Your Highness
Rate Movie[Total: 24 Average: 3.8]
- Directed By: David Gordon Green
- Written By: Danny McBride, Ben Best
- Release Date: April 8, 2011
- Domestic Distributor: Universal
- Cast: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Justin Theroux
Box Office Info:
| Budget: $50 million | Financed by: Universal |
|---|---|
| Domestic Gross: $21,596,445 | Overseas Gross: $6,417,288 |
“I’m fairly confident it’ll find its audience. It is a movie that was so aggressively criticized, certainly on the journalistic level and it wasn’t embraced by commercial audiences, and yet, in a weird way it has promoted a strange backlash which has been really affirming.”
–Director David Gordon Green
After David Gordon Green had helmed four acclaimed indies that barely did any business, he finally scored a hit with his first studio project Pineapple Express and its success allowed him to make his decade plus long passion project Your Highness. The original screenplay was written without a budget in mind and featured fantastical environments and visual effects that were expected to cost north of $200M. It was scaled down to a more reasonable $50 million net budget, which was fully financed by Universal. It marked the final released greenlit film under the previous and disastrous reign of ex-chairman Marc Shmuger.
Your Highness was expected to be released in the fall of 2010, but was delayed to April 8, 2011. Your Highness was brutalized by critics and was only tracking positively with young male auds. It bowed against another silly comedy Arthur, which cannibalized each other’s audience and Hanna and Soul Surfer also opened. Your Highness disappointed with just $9,360,020 — placing #6 for the weekend led by the holdover Hop. Audiences gave the movie a poor C+ Cinemascore and Your Highness sank 57.1% to $4,019,710 in its second frame and fell 57.5% to $1,706,590 in its third session. The domestic run closed after only 6 weeks with $21,596,445.
Universal dumped Your Highness overseas, where it pulled in just $6.4 million and it went straight to video in most key markets. The worldwide cume was $24.8M and Universal would see returned about $13.6M after theaters take their percentage of the gross — which would leave most of their P&A expenses in the red and the budget at a loss.