When finished, the first cut of the film successfully received an NC-17 rating from the MPAA board mostly for its nudity and sexual content; the film originally had a real sex scene between two actors, including a real orgasm, which violated MPAA regulations. Over 20 minutes of footage had to be cut in order for the film to receive an R-rating. The film is rated 18 by the British Board of Film Classification. Release Box office Hostel opened theatrically on January 6, 2006, in the United States and earned $19.6 million in its first weekend, ranking number one at the box office. By the end of its run, six weeks later, the film grossed $47.3 million in the US box office and $33.3 million internationally for a worldwide total of $80.6 million. Critical response Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 59% based on 110 reviews and an average rating of 6.1/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Featuring lots of guts and gore, Hostel is a wildly entertaining corpse-filled journey—assuming one is entertained by corpses, guts, and gore, that is." On Metacritic, the film had a weighted average score of 55 out of 100 based on 21 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C–" on an A+ to F scale. Entertainment Weeklys film critic Owen Gleiberman commended the film's creativity, saying "You may or may not believe that slavering redneck psychos, of the kind who leer through Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, can be found in the Southwest, but it's all too easy to envision this sort of depravity in the former Soviet bloc, the crack-up of which has produced a brutal marketplace of capitalistic fiendishness. The torture scenes in Hostel (snipped toes, sliced ankles, pulled eyeballs) are not, in essence, much different from the surgical terrors in the Saw films, only Roth, by presenting his characters as victims of the same world of flesh-for-fantasy they were grooving on in the first place, digs deep into the nightmare of a society ruled by the profit of illicit desire." German film historian Florian Evers pointed out the Holocaust imagery behind Hostels horror iconography, connecting Roth's film to the Nazi exploitation genre. The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote that Hostel was "actually silly, crass and queasy. And not in a good way".<ref>Peter Bradshaw: "Hostel" review,