With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino makes history fun

by Sebastian · Published August 22, 2009 · Updated October 25, 2009

says Maryanne Bilbao in a quick review at AC. With the US opening day behind us, and Germany moving into the third evening, things are heating up for the Inglourious Basterds. Personally, I haven’t managed to see it in theaters again, yet, but many many friends have and pretty much everyone was quite blown away. In our previous entry I’ve given a little rundown of recent articles and reviews, and you can still check out our soundtrack giveaway here. Let me just lose a few words about what Basterds means in its broader context of the movie biz.

UPDATE 2: While I was writing this, Variety reports Basterds made a whoppin’ $14.3 million on Friday alone (also EW), this being Tarantino’s best ever opening day (the movie made $1.4 million in France alone only on Wednesday). Watch this space for updates! AP now reports that the movie made $37.6 million already exceeding some expectations. Internationally, the movie has made a studio-estimated $27.5 million ( in 22 territories) according to the LA Times.

The other day BoxOfficeMojo (one of the better websites to get your movie numbers) wrote that in the US, Basterds would be “invading” 4,400 screens at 3,165 sites/theaters. Robert Rodriguez’ Shorts by the way at at 3,105 sites, which is why some commentors have mentioned that the two cinematic brothers are going head to head at the box office this weekend, which is ridiculous, considering the target audiences of the two films. At the same time they are predicting at $26 million opening gross for the film domestically. I’m not an expert on this, but considering the lack of a competition that has this sort of buzz, I’d say that’s a very conservative estimate. The Numbers rightfully says only Basterds has a shot at the top. What I think will be more interesting however is to see how well it will do in the movies other two main markets, France and Germany, where even Death Proof has done very well, and the press is praising Basterds like there’s no tomorrow. The movie opens in Germany partially dubbed (only the English-speaking parts are dubbed into German, leaving the other parts virtually untouched), which is a relief for most fans, but quite courageous considering that it’s a country where everything is dubbed, from the smallest TV show to the biggest blockbuster, and audiences aside from the student and foreign business demographic are not used to watching movies with subtitles (in that sense quite similar to the US audience). It will be interesting to track this movie over the next days and weeks, and you can for example click here at boxofficemojo.com to get their numbers. Personally I have a very good feeling about this one. The only thing that earlier reviewers this weekend lamented of course was the discrepancy between what some trailers might’ve promised and what the movie delivered, a discrepancy that was slightly smaller internationally where the marketing was more light-hearted. But I think (and that’s what I’ve experienced the last two days) that word of mouth especially will give Basterds a huge bump, and at least by monday or tuesday (American sometimes wait to catch sunday matinees) we’ll know whether there’ll be a huge party in the “casa de Weinstein” :) We’ll keep you posted, keep sending your links and reviews!