The Bonus (1974): cast, story & where to watch

Released in 1974, The Bonus is a drama and tv movie film directed by Sergei Mikaelyan, running about 85 minutes.

What it’s about. A small construction team led by Potapov suddenly refuses to receive a bonus payment from their company for exceeding performance targets. The team accuses its construction company HQ with artificially reducing the targets, so they can be easily exceeded. It makes the management looks good, yet leads to frequent downtime reducing earnings for common construction workers even with fake bonuses. On a hastily organized meeting the management tries to subdue the "unruly" gang leader charging that he cannot know all details. It turned out that Potapov and his team prepared a detailed business analysis, which proved their point. Managers, who had different interests and positions, have to decide how to deal with the real problem leading to unexpected results.

Who’s in it. The Bonus stars Evgeni Leonov as Vasily Potapov, gang leader, Vladimir Samoylov as Pavel Batartsev, managing director, Oleg Yankovskiy as Lev Solomakhin, Communist party boss at the company, second-in-command and Mikhail Gluzskiy as Boris Shatunov, head of planning department, among others.

How it landed. With an audience score of 6.2/10, The Bonus has drawn a solid, mixed-to-positive response.

Where to watch. Streaming options change often. See the full, country-by-country breakdown on our where to watch The Bonus page.

If you liked it. Fans of The Bonus tend to enjoy The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, Schindler's List and The Godfather Part II.