‘Babylon’ Success in France is Quite Something, One Million Tickets Sold

While Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” bombed stateside, in France it’s just surpassed 1 million tickets sold.

As a reader alluded to me via email, “This is the country in which “Once upon a time in the West” played for a year in a Parisian cinema while it barely scratched even Stateside. This is the country that loved 1970s American cinema and 1980s Mickey Rourke. This is the country in which critics love Michael Mann, Jeff Nichols, Woody Allen and James Gray, probably due to nostalgia of 1970s US cinema.

“Movie buffs I know who live in provincial French towns say their younger friends are just interested in Marvel, that people are more into series or Netflix than cinema” this reader adds.

The success of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” was seen as an exception due to : 1) the fact that it was the only big budget Hollywood thing released at the time. 2) the supposed fact that the name Tarantino spoke more to a Netflix-fuelled generation than Scorsese or Spielberg.

Does the success of “Babylon” in France have to do with Brad Pitt? Maybe. Movie star-driven cinema is still very much a thing there. Chazelle is certainly not a rock star like Tarantino or Nolan.

In Thierry Fremaux’s book “Selection Officielle” he mentions the steps he took in desperately trying to get “La La Land” at Cannes back in 2016. “Whiplash,” despite premiering at Sundance, had made a major splash at the Quinzaine fed Realisateurs sidebar in 2014.

However, the biggest factor seems to be that French critics didn’t hate “Babylon” as much as their American counterparts did. In fact, reviews for “Babylon” have been excellent and audience scores have been even better. This says that not everything is dead in France. Vive le cinema!