Caan did not return in the film, the former due to scheduling conflicts while the latter disapproves the film, which was subjected by Caan as anti-American culture and slavery. In terror over her sex scene, Bryce Dallas Howard said she went through it in a hypnotic state. After the first take she excused herself and went to the bathroom to collect her thoughts. Then she just started to look at it as some sort of comedic scene. "Just in my head. And interestingly enough, Lars kind of felt that. The scene wasn't written funny at all, but there are some really eccentric and absurd moments in that scene that people tend to chuckle at." Donkey killing During production, a donkey was slaughtered for dramatic purposes. The scene was cut from the film before it was released. Release Critical reception Manderlay received mixed reviews from critics. , the film holds a 50% approval rating on review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, based on 103 reviews with an average rating of 5.70/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Manderlay may work better as a political statement than as a film, making its points at the expense of telling a compelling story." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 46 out of 100, based on 29 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Anthony Lane of The New Yorker said, "Von Trier is not so much a filmmaker as a misanthropic mesmerist, who uses movies to bend the viewer to his humorless will," while Josh Kun of the Los Angeles Times added, "Trier gets lost in his own rhetoric." Conversely, The Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw and Roger Ebert both gave the film mildly positive reviews. While noting, "Many moviegoers are likely to like the film less than the discussion it drags them into," Ebert opined, "The crucial difference between Manderlay and the almost unbearable Dogville is not that [von Trier's] politics have changed, but that his sense of mercy for the audience has been awakened." Peter Bradshaw claimed that Manderlay "is a wind-up, but an effective wind-up," and wrote of von Trier's Land of Opportunities trilogy, "My guess is you can throw away the first and third movies and keep this one." Box office The film did not perform well at the box-office, taking a total of only $674,918. Compared to its production budget of $14.2 million, this makes it a box