‘Memoir Of A Snail’ Delivered Second-Highest Per-Theater Average At The Weekend Box Office

Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail enjoyed an excellent launch across five theaters in Los Angeles and New York last weekend, earning the second-best per theater average of any film currently in release.

The IFC Films title picked up $64,816 across its five locations, for a $12,963 per-theater average, second only to Anora, which had a $26,730 average across 34 theaters.

Memoir of a Snail will expand to other key markets this weekend, before broader nationwide expansion in November. The film premiered at Annecy last June, where it won the Cristal for feature, and has since gone on to win the top prize at the BFI London Film Festival and the audience award and special jury prize at Animation is Film.

It’s hard to predict how Elliot’s movie will perform in the U.S., and projections are made even more difficult by the fact that Memoir has (quite bizarrely) received an R rating. The MPA rated it as such based on “sexual content, nudity, and some violent content,” but the film doesn’t tonally feel like it deserves such a rating – and it also feels wrong to rate body parts sculpted in clay with lumpy cartoon proportions with the same scrutiny as live-action anatomy of human actors.

Further complicating box office projections is that few comps exist for adult-centric stop-motion features, especially since many such films never receive stateside theatrical releases (think Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99, Cesar Cabral’s Bob Spit: We Do Not Like People, or Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña’s The Wolf House). Elliot’s own previous feature Mary and Max doesn’t offer any clues either since it never received a U.S. theatrical release.

So we’re left with just a couple examples of R-rated (or equivalent) adult stop-motion films in the theatrical marketplace. They are:

• Phil Tippett’s Mad God, an unrated but definitely R-rated film, was released by the same distributor (IFC Films) in 2022. At its peak, the film appeared in 37 theaters and managed a domestic total of $325,042.
• Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Anomalisa, rated R, was released by Paramount Pictures in 2015. It peaked at 573 theaters, grossing $3.75 million over its run.