The NeverEnding Story

Wolfgang Petersen's The NeverEnding Story opened in West Germany in April 1984 and was, at the time, the most expensive German production ever made — a budget of approximately $27 million when the typical German feature ran at one-tenth of that. Petersen had broken through internationally two years earlier with Das Boot (1981), the wartime submarine film that would earn him six Academy Award nominations; this was the project he chose for his first English-language feature.

The film is adapted from Michael Ende's 1979 novel Die unendliche Geschichte, a German children's book that had become a major literary phenomenon and would eventually sell over forty million copies in over forty languages. Ende disowned the film after seeing the production, criticising the changes Petersen and co-writer Herman Weigel had made to the source material; he tried unsuccessfully to have his name removed and later filed a lawsuit against the producers. The puppet creatures, including Falkor the luckdragon and the Rockbiter, were designed by Brian Froud's team and built by Brian Henson and Jim Henson's Creature Shop alumni at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich.

The synthesiser score by Klaus Doldinger and Giorgio Moroder, with the title song performed by Limahl of Kajagoogoo, became one of the iconic sonic textures of mid-1980s family cinema. The film grossed over $100 million worldwide on a budget of $27 million and was followed by two unrelated sequels (1990, 1994) without Petersen's involvement; he moved to Hollywood after this, eventually directing In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy. He died in 2022.