Note the very British Blue Peter badge on the hat of the far-left pirate.
Aardman, for the few of you that don't know, is the studio that brought us Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Chicken Run, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas, four brilliant films that all received critical praise, with the former two being lauded as fantastic. And now their latest film, The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists, is out; it's been out for about two months over here in the UK, and about one month in the US. However, whilst the critical praise is (as we have come to expect with Aardman) high, the box-office returns are not so.
So far, The Pirates!, branded in the US as The Pirates! Band of Misfits, the big screen adaptation of Gideon Defoe's popular children's books, has grossed about $100,000,000 worldwide. Only a quarter of that amount was collected in the US, with the majority coming from other regions (it had a particularly strong box-office run here in the UK). As we reported a few weeks ago, The Pirates! was received with, despite the positive word of mouth, Aardman's weakest opening ever stateside, and hasn't drastically improved on that since. Admittedly, $100 million isn't to be sniffed at, it's more than double the takings of the likes of, the equally great, live-action feature Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but it's still disappointing for a film that has received such strong critical praise and a fairly good advertising campaign.
Unfortunately though, this is more the rule than the exception where Aardman films are concerned, despite an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 88% and a national following here in the UK, Aardman films average less than $170 million worldwide; largely due to none too strong performances in America. The question though is why, when they are such huge hits here in the UK?
