questionable · Unknown
Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession
A scientist builds a time machine and accidentally sends his apartment complex manager and a petty burglar to 16th century Moscow, while Tsar Ivan the Terrible travels to 1973.
Comedy, Science Fiction
Before you choose
What kind of time-travel story is this?
Time travel drives much of the story.
A borderline case: the temporal interpretation remains disputed. The mechanism is classified as Unknown.
Why the archive makes this assessment (spoilers)
Shurik's home-built time machine opens a portal to 16th-century Moscow and swaps the building manager Bunsha and the burglar Miloslavsky with Ivan the Terrible. The rest of the film cross-cuts the two stranded parties: Bunsha forced to play tsar at court, Ivan loose in 1970s Moscow, and the race to repair the machine and swap them back. Temporal displacement drives nearly every scene. It stops short of 9–10 because time is a setting for farce rather than something with paradoxes or lasting consequences, and the closing reveal frames the adventure as Shurik's dream.
The time-machine adventure is framed by a possible dream ending, so literal displacement remains uncertain.
Check the supporting sources ↓An editorial assessment based on the archive’s documented plot research.
Explore other films in this classification →Scale, legacy & time
The scores
Weighted archive score
high confidence
Aggregate source ratings
How Titan works
Titan combines the archive’s quality, audience and legacy base with the significance of time travel. It is an index, not a score out of 100, and is distinct from the FMV archive’s scoring model.
Titan = base × [0.20 + 0.80 × (time-travel score ÷ 10)²]
This film: 90.22 base × 71.2% weighting.
Partial inputs flag incomplete source metadata. Provisional weighting flags a time-travel assessment that remains uncertain; it receives no additional confidence penalty.
The evidence
Research & sources
Research notes may reveal plot details.
These sources support the plot facts and catalog research. The numerical scores are the archive’s judgments, not ratings supplied by these sources.
Cast: Aleksandr Demyanenko, Yuriy Yakovlev, Leonid Kuravlyov, Mikhail Pugovkin, Vladimir Etush
Edition by edition
Releases & formats
0 cataloged editions. Narrow by format, then check region, audio and subtitles. Missing specifications mean unknown, not absent.
No release editions are cataloged for this film yet. This does not mean that no release exists.