FRANCE—The idea to make a hit movie that would appeal to French audiences by emulating Judd Apatow's "mix of crude humor and heart" has apparently paid off for the producers and director of Porn in the Hood (Les Keira), a low budget French comedy that, according to Variety, "has scored an estimated $5.85 million in three weeks at the local box office, proving that Gallic auds have an appetite for American-style raunchy comedies."
Hood, which opened July 11 following a $1.1 million media campaign kicked off in February by distributor Gaumont, cost an estimated $5.5 million to make, which means it has yet to make a profit despite "holding the B.O.'s fifth slot, behind The Dark Knight Rises, Ice Age: Continental Drift, The Amazing Spider-Man and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax."
According to French media, however, the Franck Gastambide-helmed movie had a "big budget" open racking up well over 90,000 individual ticket sales in its first three days alone, and is on pace to exceed the 600,000 mark that Gastambide was hoping for.
Variety describes the film, which is based on a popular Web series titled "Kaira Shopping," as a "politically incorrect pic [that] turns on three losers who've grown up together in a housing project just outside Paris, and embark on a desperate mission to become adult movie stars." Leads include Gastambide, Medi Sadoun, Jib Pocthier and Ramzy Bedia.
A review by The Hollywood Reporter calls the movie's English titile "idiotic" and the film itself "a tedious exercise in outré humor," but notes it is "well on its way to becoming a sleeper summer hit, at least locally. Overseas action will be limited to Francophone territories, while other distributors will require a decent urban dictionary and perhaps a large bag of weed to translate the film’s unbeatable slang, delivered in rapid-fire bursts by its trio of man-boy hoodlums."
