news culture This film, with a whopping budget of $80 million, was a resounding flop at the box office… except in France
Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s new film, hit theaters at the start of the year and apparently didn’t have the expected success worldwide. Nevertheless, France brought him a brilliant career in cinema, which surprised the director himself.
The pure party
Damien Chazelle is no famous unknown in the film landscape. With Whiplash, the French-American director hit hard: This poignant and highly stylized tale of a jazz drummer and his teacher (played by the very good Miles Teller and JK Simmons respectively) is quite simply one of the best films of the last decade, and you wouldn’t know it would give you an overly good guess .
Enough to finally launch the career of the director who spawned La La Land and First Man in 2016 and 2018. early 2023 i.eBut he came back in full force with Babylon, a pointed, sometimes irreverent, but always visually and aurally sublime feature film about the early days of the Hollywood industry and talkies.
A fable about partying and its excesses, about the bombast of the 1920s and the rise of a cult titan: sophisticated imagery, striking choreography, a five-star cast (Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Tobey Maguire…) and an $80 million budget (without marketing) were therefore on the program for a convincing result. Except… the sauce didn’t fit commercially.
Babylow
It’s a fact that’s hard for both Damien Chazelle and the Paramount producers to digest: “Babylon” was a heavy flop at the worldwide box office with around 63.4 million US dollars, the breakeven point is estimated at … 230 million US dollars according to Deadline. In the United States in particular, the public did not react.
But in France, against all odds, it’s a resounding yes! With 1.5 million tickets sold, Babylon is currently the 8th biggest hit of 2023 in France. And on the occasion of the film’s release on Blu-Ray, Damien Chazelle spoke to Canal+ about this national success that he didn’t particularly expect:
It’s part of the adventure of every film. You never know exactly what’s going to happen. It was also quite fascinating on a sociological level to see how different countries reacted differently to the film even though it was the same film.
In fact, the success in France is a bit of a mystery, I’m not entirely sure how it comes about. Of course, having family in France, it was a great pleasure for me to see that the film did well there and that the French were there for the film. True, it was a bit brilliant, it was a dream.
Speaking of dreams, Damien Chazelle would like to make a 100% French film. Maybe there will be news soon.
