freely provided audio parts from The Fountain'''s film score, remix the music, and upload the work onto the website to be evaluated by other users. Release The film had its world premiere at the 63rd Venice Film Festival on September 2, 2006. Several critics booed The Fountain at the festival's press screening, while the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the public screening the following evening. The Fountain was released in 1,472 theaters in the United States and Canada on November 22, 2006, a day before the American Thanksgiving holiday. The film earned $3,768,702 in the U.S. and Canadian box office during the opening weekend of November 24. The Fountain earned $10,144,010 in the United States and Canada, and $5,761,344 in other territories. The film, which had a production budget of $35 million, grossed $15,978,422 in theaters worldwide. The box-office performance was considered a flop with the film only earning back 54% of its budget. Reception Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade C− on scale of A to F. Newsweek reported how people received the film: "Its supporters admire the film's beauty and daring; its detractors find it overblown and hokey." Michael Atkinson, writing for Sight & Sound, reviewed Aronofsky's endeavor: "It's difficult to recall another American film that, in pursuing a passionate and personal vision, goes so maddeningly, uproariously wrong." Atkinson said of the narrative, "The erratic and pointless leapfrogging between its storylines is torporific ... all three stories are assembled piecemeal, many of which repeat over and over as flashback and flashforwards." He complained of the numerous motifs, "It's difficult to swallow the amalgamation of Mayan, Biblical, Buddhist, Taoist and New Age iconography, all of it tossed as if into a stew." In contrast, Glenn Kenny of Premiere wrote of the film, "The Fountain is probably the deftest stories-within-stories narrative film I've seen ... By The Fountains end, the multilayered meta-narrative... resolves (or does it?) into a kind of diegetic Möbius strip, to stunning effect." Kenny called the film "as demanding as it is dazzling" and compared Aronofsky's direction to Stanley Kubrick's "in terms of conceptual audacity and meticulousness of execution." He concluded, "It's a movie that's as deeply felt as it is imagined." Anthony Lane, reviewing for The New Yorker, called The Fountain "a gorgeous nimbus of confusion." Lane complained about the film's up-close and far-away shots, "What fails to concern or attract