Which movie features the most individual credits?
Until the last couple of decades, the idea of any cinema audience staying in the theatre to watch the credits would have been hugely unlikely. After all, as soon as those credits start to roll, the movie is over as far as most people are concerned, and they’re getting the heck out of dodge. However, with the rise of post-credits sequences – mainly thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe – regular cinemagoers are more aware than ever of how many people it takes to bring a movie to the screen.
Now, sitting through the seemingly endless credits that scroll after the average blockbuster just to see a 30-second skit that doesn’t amount to much can be frustrating, but it can also be illuminating. As much as audiences these days are being trained to think of movies as disposable content that can be forgotten about as soon as it’s consumed, these things are the result of huge numbers of artists working hard to realise a vision. They deserve their flowers, right?
Fascinatingly, the first movie to include a disclaimer that let the audience know how many people worked on it was the 2012 Liam Neeson sequel Taken 2. Its vaguely worded message read, “The making and legal distribution of this film supported over 14,000 American jobs and involved over 600,000 work hours.” Now, these numbers are almost impossible to confirm, but the sentiment was worthwhile.
It does beg the question, though: how many people tend to work on the average movie? Well, that’s similarly difficult to put your finger on because movies come in all shapes and sizes. It stands to reason that fewer people will work on a small independent talking heads drama than will ply their trade on a $200 million blockbuster, right?
However, in 2014, movie industry data analyst Stephen Follows tried to shed some light on the numbers. Follows looked at the 50 highest-grossing films of the previous 20 years, and his results were intriguing. He found that the average number of crew credits was 588, but over half of the movies analysed had less than 500 people credited. In the decade following Follows’ data crunch, though, a movie emerged that broke a Guinness World Record for “most credited individuals for a movie” – and it was a hell of a lot more than 500.
Incredibly, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War had 5,109 names in the credits, which ran for a butt-numbing 10 minutes.
But why were there so many of them?
When analysing why such an enormous number of people were credited with Avengers: Infinity War, a pattern discovered in 2014 still holds true today. He found the films that consistently had the most significant number of credits were all special effects pictures. Amazingly, for 57 of the 1,000 movies analysed, the Visual Effects Department accounted for more than half of all crew members.
In the decade since Follows did his study, the amount of Marvel movies and other massive blockbusters that rely heavily on CGI and visual effects has increased exponentially. Multiple effects houses are now being used for any one movie, as the demand is so high that it would be impossible for one company to meet it. In fact, the insatiable demand has arguably led to a downturn in the quality of visual effects because there simply isn’t enough time or manpower to execute them properly. When you think of it like this, it makes perfect sense that Infinity War employed a sobering 2,659 people in its effects department alone.
