Ratatouille Rocks France
Disney/Pixar Movie Breaks Box Office Records for Animated Film
Aug 10, 2007
Ratatouille may have gotten a lukewarm reception at the North American box office, but the French are swooning for the Pixar film.
According to Variety, the Brad Bird movie smashed French box office records for an animated film, raking in nearly $16 million in its first week. That averaged out to 1,951,074 ticket sales on 721 prints of the flick. That meant that each screen had 2,706 viewers in front of it. That's the highest ever for an animated movie.
More Successful in France than Finding Nemo
In comparison, the Andrew Stanton-directed Finding Nemo sold 2,056,621 tickets for a total of $12.1 million, when it opened in France in November of 2003. That film, Pixar’s box office champ at $339 million, was less successful with the French than Ratatouille, despite opening on 172 more screens.
Finding Nemo played in 893 cinemas, and had 2,303 viewers per print.
Even the French movie critics, who tend to look down their Gallic noses at major studio Hollywood product, found themselves in agreement with their North American counterparts. Film reviewers unanimously gave the Brad Bird film their stamp of approval.
"It’s been a long time since any film celebrated, with so much kitsch energy, France: its cuisine, its finest features, and Paris, capital of taste," said the weekly Telerama, managing to drop a high art sneer against mass-market film amongst the plaudits.
Le Monde Loves Ratatouille
The daily newspaper Le Monde went even farther in its praise, calling Ratatouille "one of the greatest gastronomic films in the history of cinema." Other reviewers applauded the movie's close attention to detail in its depiction of Paris and the French countryside.
It's not surprising that the French would respond positively to the flick. Ratatouille is set in a restaurant in Paris, where a young rat (voiced by Patton Oswalt) dreams of becoming a master chef. In the very first minute of the movie, a voice-over proclaimed that "some of the best restaurants in the world are in Paris."
Despite an impressive 96% Fresh rating on movie site Rotten Tomatoes (which means that 160 out of 166 critics polled loved the film), Ratatouille got a relatively lackluster reception from audiences. After 6 weeks in North American theatres, the flick has pulled $190 million.
In comparison, Dreamworks Animation's Shrek the Third, which pulled a 42% Rotten rating, has made nearly $321 million at the box office. Twentieth Century Fox’s The Simpsons Movie has already raked in an impressive $138 million after two and a half weeks in theatres.
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