The Great Dictator
Synopsis
20 years after the end of WWI, in which the nation of Tomainia was on the losing side, Adenoid Hynkel has risen to power as the ruthless dictator of the country. He believes in a pure Aryan state and the decimation of the Jews. This situation is unknown to a simple Jewish Tomainian barber who has been hospitalized since a WWI battle. Upon his release the barber, who had been suffering from memory loss about the war, is shown the new persecuted life of the Jews by many living in the Jewish ghetto, including a washerwoman named Hannah with whom he begins a relationship. The barber is ultimately spared such persecution by Commander Schultz, whom he saved in that WWI battle. The lives of all Jews in Tomainia are eventually spared with a policy shift by Hynkel himself, who is doing so for ulterior motives. But those motives include a desire for world domination, starting with the invasion of neighboring Osterlich, which may be threatened by Benzino Napaloni, the dictator of neighboring Bacteria. Ultimately Schultz, who has turned traitor against Hynkel's regime, and the barber may be able to join forces to take control of the situation, using Schultz's inside knowledge of the regime's workings and the barber's uncanny resemblance to one of those in power.
Production Budget Analysis
What was the production budget for The Great Dictator?
Directed by Charlie Chaplin, with Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie leading the cast, The Great Dictator was produced by Charles Chaplin Productions with a confirmed budget of $2,000,000, placing it in the micro-budget category for comedy films.
At $2,000,000, The Great Dictator was produced on a lean budget. Lower-budget films benefit from reduced break-even thresholds, with profitability achievable at approximately $5,000,000.
Budget Comparison — Similar Productions
• Seven Samurai (1954): Budget $2,000,000 | Gross $105,000,000 → ROI: 5150% • Sing Sing (2024): Budget $2,000,000 | Gross $3,401,789 → ROI: 70% • The Lives of Others (2006): Budget $2,000,000 | Gross $77,672,685 → ROI: 3784% • Anatomy of a Murder (1959): Budget $2,000,000 | Gross $8,000,000 → ROI: 300% • The Secret in Their Eyes (2009): Budget $2,000,000 | Gross $33,965,843 → ROI: 1598%
Key Budget Allocation Categories
▸ Talent Salaries & Producing Deals Established comedic talent can command $15–20 million per film, with top-tier stars earning even more through producing credits and backend deals. Comedy ensembles multiply this cost across several well-known performers.
▸ Production & Location Filming While comedies generally avoid the VFX costs of action films, location shooting in recognizable cities or exotic locales adds meaningful production expense.
▸ Marketing & P&A (Prints & Advertising) Comedies rely heavily on marketing to build opening-weekend momentum. Studios typically spend 50–100% of the production budget on marketing, with comedy trailers and social media campaigns being particularly expensive.
Key Production Personnel
CAST: Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Jack Oakie, Reginald Gardiner, Henry Daniell Key roles: Charlie Chaplin as Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania / A Jewish Barber; Paulette Goddard as Hannah; Jack Oakie as Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria; Reginald Gardiner as Commander Schultz
DIRECTOR: Charlie Chaplin CINEMATOGRAPHY: Karl Struss, Roland Totheroh MUSIC: Meredith Willson, Charlie Chaplin EDITING: Willard Nico PRODUCTION: Charles Chaplin Productions FILMED IN: United States of America
Box Office Performance
The Great Dictator earned $11,000,000 in worldwide box office revenue.
Break-Even Analysis
Using the industry-standard 2.5x multiplier (P&A + exhibitor shares of 40–50% + distribution fees), The Great Dictator needed approximately $5,000,000 to break even. The film surpassed this threshold by $6,000,000.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Revenue: $11,000,000 Budget: $2,000,000 Net: $9,000,000 ROI: 450.0%
Profitability Assessment
VERDICT: Highly Profitable
The Great Dictator was a clear financial success, generating $11,000,000 worldwide against a $2,000,000 production budget — a 450% ROI. After estimated marketing costs, the film still delivered substantial profit to Charles Chaplin Productions.
INDUSTRY IMPACT
The outsized success of The Great Dictator likely influenced studio greenlight decisions for similar comedy projects.
The Great Dictator influenced numerous directors, such as Stanley Kubrick, Mel Brooks, Wes Anderson, and Chuck Jones and inspired such films as The Dictator (2012), The Interview (2014), and Jojo Rabbit (2019).
In 2004, the British Film Institute (BFI) published a collection of essays on Chaplin and The Great Dictator in the book Chaplin: The Dictator and the Tramp, edited by Frank Scheide and Hooman Mehran as part of the BFI's creation of the Chaplin research programme. In 2005, the British Film institute in conjunction with the University of Southampton and the London College of Communication hosted "The Charles Chaplin Conference" in London to coincide with the institute's establishment of the Chaplin research programme.
Sean McArdle and Jon Judy's Eisner Award-nominated comic book The Führer and the Tramp is set during the production of The Great Dictator.
The final speech of the film has been sampled in more than 40 songs, artists such as Coldplay and U2 have played the speech during live shows, and coffee company Lavazza used it in a television advertisement.
PRODUCTION NOTES
▸ Production
According to Jürgen Trimborn's biography of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, both Chaplin and French filmmaker René Clair viewed Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will together at a showing at the New York Museum of Modern Art. Filmmaker Luis Buñuel reports that Clair was horrified by the power of the film, crying out that this should never be shown or the West was lost. Chaplin, on the other hand, laughed uproariously at the film. He used it to inspire many elements of The Great Dictator, and, by repeatedly viewing this film, Chaplin could closely mimic Hitler's mannerisms.
Trimborn suggests that Chaplin decided to proceed with making The Great Dictator after viewing Riefenstahl's film. Hynkel's rally speech near the beginning of the film, delivered in German-sounding gibberish, is a caricature of Hitler's oratory style, which Chaplin also studied carefully in newsreels.
The film was directed by Chaplin (with his half-brother Wheeler Dryden as assistant director), and written and produced by Chaplin. The film was shot largely at the Charlie Chaplin Studios and other locations around Los Angeles. The elaborate World War I scenes were filmed in Laurel Canyon. Chaplin and Meredith Willson composed the music.
Chaplin wanted to address the escalating violence and repression of Jews by the Nazis throughout the late 1930s, the magnitude of which was conveyed to him personally by his European Jewish friends and fellow artists. Nazi Germany's repressive nature and militarist tendencies were well known at the time. Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not To Be dealt with similar themes, and also used a mistaken-identity Hitler figure. But Chaplin later said that he would not have made the film had he known of the true extent of the Nazis' crimes.
▸ Music & Score
The film score was written and composed by Meredith Willson, later known as composer and librettist of the 1957 musical comedy The Music Man:
Commenting on this, Lutz Peter Koepnick writes in 2002,
AWARDS & RECOGNITION
Summary: Nominated for 5 Oscars. 7 wins & 6 nominations total
Awards Won: ★ New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor — Charlie Chaplin ★ National Board of Review: Top Ten Films
Nominations: ○ Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay (13th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Actor (13th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Original Score (13th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Picture (13th Academy Awards) ○ Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (13th Academy Awards)
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Chaplin's film was released nine months after Hollywood's first parody of Hitler, the short subject You Nazty Spy! by the Three Stooges, which premiered in January 1940. Chaplin had been planning his feature-length work for years, and began filming in September 1939. Hitler had been previously allegorically pilloried in the 1933 German film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, by Fritz Lang.
The film was well received in the United States at the time of its release and was popular with the American public. For example, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a truly superb accomplishment by a truly great artist" and "perhaps the most significant film ever produced." The film was also popular in the United Kingdom, drawing 9 million to the cinemas, despite Chaplin's fears that wartime audiences would dislike a comedy about a dictator. The film earned theater rentals of $3.5 million from the U.S. and Canada and $5 million in total worldwide rentals.
During the film's production, the National Government of Neville Chamberlain had announced that it would prohibit its showing in the UK in keeping with its policy of appeasement towards Germany. By the time the film was released, however, Britain was at war with Germany and the film was welcomed in part for its obvious propaganda value. In 1941, London's Prince of Wales Theatre screened its UK premiere. The film had been banned in many parts of Europe, and the theatre's owner, Alfred Esdaile, was apparently fined for showing it.
When the film was released in France in 1945, it became the most popular film of the year, with admissions of 8,360,048. The film was voted at No. 24 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. In 2010, The Guardian considered it the 22nd-best comedy film of all time. The film was voted at No.
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