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 cost a tenth of that. Petersen had broken through internationally three years earlier with Das Boot (1981), the wartime submarine film that would earn him six Academy Award nominations, and 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 literary phenomenon and would eventually sell over forty million copies in over forty languages. Ende disowned the film after seeing the production, objecting to the changes Petersen and his co-writer Herman Weigel had made to the book; he tried and failed to have his name removed, and later sued the producers. The puppet creatures, among them Falkor the luckdragon and the Rockbiter, were designed by Brian Froud's team and built by Brian Henson and alumni of Jim Henson's Creature Shop at Bavaria Film Studios in Munich.

The synthesiser score by Klaus Doldinger and Giorgio Moroder, with the title song sung by Limahl of Kajagoogoo, is one of the defining sounds 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) made without Petersen. He moved to Hollywood after this, and went on to direct In the Line of Fire, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm and Troy. He died in 2022.