Remember when you were a kid, and you spent hours enjoying the comic-page antics of Asterix and Obelix, two ancient Gauls? Don’t you? Are you sure? Oh wait, you’re American. Pardon, mon ami.

Well, this will be be news to you then.

PARIS — A massive publicity campaign, a star-studded cast and a huge number of prints seem to have paid off for “Asterix at the Olympic Games” in Gaul. Bowing on a record-breaking 1,078 screens nationwide, the first-day admissions for the Pathe picture stood at 464,248 and a gross of more than $4.1 million.

In some ways the analogous franchise for Americans would be the Flinstones movies, except there are three live-action Asterix adventures and they’re all runaway hits, while our version merely served to prolong the career of Steven Baldwin by giving him the Barney Rubble part in the flop sequel.

And here is another way the two franchises are similar:

Local critics have almost unanimously savaged the picture. It “bathes in a tepid marmalade … prepare to be disappointed,” Le Parisien declared. “The vacuity of this enormous cooking pot ends up making you nauseous,” Le Monde wrote.

Apparently gourmet rats have taken over not only 5 star restaurants, but also the film criticism positions of France. If you see a film critic in Paris, I bet you can’t convince him to take off his beret!

American film buyers must be pulling their hair out over this movie, which is making huge money, not affected by the writers strike, probably going cheap - and yet completely without any commerical potential. It’s like putting a photograph of a juicy steak before a starving man.

-daniel k.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 6:17 am and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.