Box Office
For the original British and Australian releases, a spoof travelogue narrated by John Cleese, Away From It All, was shown before the film itself. It consisted mostly of stock travelogue footage and featured arch comments from Cleese. For instance, a shot of Bulgarian girls in ceremonial dresses was accompanied by the comment "You'd never believe that these girls were plotting the downfall of Western Civilisation as we know it!", Communist Bulgaria being a member of the Warsaw Pact at the time. Not only was this a spoof of travelogues per se, it was a protest against the then common practice in Britain of showing cheaply made banal short features before a main feature.
Life of Brian opened on 17 August 1979 in five North American theatres and grossed $140,034 USD ($28,007 per screen) in its opening weekend. Its total gross was $19,398,164 USD. It was the highest grossing British film in North America that year. In addition, the film was the fourth highest grossing film in Britain in 1979.
On 30 April 2004, Life of Brian was rereleased on five North American screens to "cash in" (as Terry Jones put it) on the box office success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It grossed $26,376 USD ($5,275 per screen) in its opening weekend. It ran until October 2004, playing at 28 screens at its widest point, eventually grossing $646,124 USD during its rerelease. By comparison, a rerelease of Monty Python and the Holy Grail had earned $1.8 million USD three years earlier. A DVD of the film was also released that year.
Read more about this topic: Monty Python's Life Of Brian
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“He holds the wire from this box of nerves
Praising the moral error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger’s emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“‘Tis all men’s office to speak patience
To those that wring under the load of sorrow,
But no man’s virtue nor sufficiency
To be so moral when he shall endure
The like himself.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)