Released in 2007, His Majesty Minor’ was destroyed by critics and the public. Jean-Jacques Annaud’s most terrible failure in his career
Being a world-renowned filmmaker, having a solid career built over decades and boasting numerous successes in your filmography does not have to be a guarantee of success.. Every director, actor or professional in the film industry has experienced successes and failures in their career, whether due to poor reception by critics or poor results at the box office. Sometimes even both.
Nor have the most veteran filmmakers been spared from this, whose long career is more likely to have had some ups and downs. Let them tell Steven Spielberg with 1941, Jurassic Park 3 either Hook, or Martin Scorsese himself, who also has some box office disasters in his filmography. One of the most famous French directors in the industry, Jean-Jacques Annaud, most famous for his film The name of the rose, who has experienced some failures throughout his artistic career with films that could not find their audience. However, the worst of them all would be His Majesty Minora fantasy comedy released in 2007 that was not well received by audiences or critics.
Set in Ancient Greece, His Majesty Minor is the story of Minor, a half-man, half-pig creature, orphaned and mute, who lives on a farm located on a remote imaginary island in the Aegean Sea with his friend Sow. One day, perched on an olive branch to try to spy on Clythia, the patriarch’s daughter, Minor takes a bad fall. Surprisingly, when he wakes up, his life has changed: not only has he not died, but he seems endowed with special abilities and ends up being crowned king.
With a large budget of 26 million euros, His Majesty Minor It was, with a collection of just over 2 million, the worst result ever recorded by Annaud.
I warned everyone that it would be a very risky project
Never reluctant to talk about the ups and downs of his career, Jean-Jacques Annaud recalled his biggest failure in his interview for the magazine Les Années Laser in which he recently spoke in depth about his career.
“I saw in this film the opportunity to renew myself, to leave what many considered my comfort zone. My past as a Hellenist came back to me, I thought about the incredibly transgressive, sexual, often violent aspect of Greek mythology,” he recalls. Annaud. “I had warned everyone that it would be an unconventional, obscene project, not at all politically or cinematically correct, therefore very risky… And I had confirmation, whether in terms of critical or commercial reception: odious on the one hand, catastrophic for the other”.
This terrible failure, to which I was not accustomed, reminds me in a way of Zidane’s headbutt during the 2006 World Cup: a man for whom everything smiled and who was in danger of making his team lose
“His Majesty Minor is a bit like my Zidane headbutt in my own cinema,” adds the filmmaker.
“I made this film with complete sincerity,” he says almost two decades later. “The only thing I regret is having made the investors who believed in him lose money. “I recognize that this is completely unprofessional.”
