owner and thus keeps all the ticket revenue, in the initial run. It was the first time a major studio had used that practice. Warners also used some practices that had made The Godfather successful for Paramount the year before, such as making theaters commit to showing the film for at least 24 weeks. Overseas, the film earned rentals of $46 million for a worldwide total of $112.3 million ($ in modern dollars). It became the highest-grossing film in Japan with rentals of over $8.2 million in its first 11 weeks. After several reissues, the film has grossed $232.6 million in the United States and Canada, which when adjusted for inflation, makes it the ninth highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. and Canada and the top-grossing R-rated film of all time. , it has grossed $441 million worldwide, or $1.8 billion adjusted for inflation by 2014. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, journalist and film historian Peter Biskind wrote about Warner's reaction to the success of the film. Executives were happy, but also nervous, since the huge earnings meant that the more free-wheeling and experimental parts of what the studio had done would become limited in favor of a focus on finding profitable film ideas and projects. Critical response Stanley Kauffmann, in The New Republic, wrote, "This is the scariest film I've seen in years—the only scary film I've seen in years ... If you want to be shaken—and I found out, while the picture was going, that that's what I wanted—then The Exorcist will scare the hell out of you". Arthur D. Murphy of Variety noted that it was "an expert telling of a supernatural horror story ... The climactic sequences assault the senses and the intellect with pure cinematic terror". In the horror-film magazine Castle of Frankenstein, Joe Dante, later director of Piranha and The Howling, called it "an amazing film, and one destined to become at the very least a horror classic. [It] will be profoundly disturbing to all audiences, especially the more sensitive and those who tend to 'live' the movies they see ... Suffice it to say, there has never been anything like this on the screen before". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a complete four-star review, praising the actors (particularly Burstyn) and the convincing special effects, but at the end of the review wrote: "I am not sure exactly