Box office
Django Unchained grossed $162.8 million in the United States and Canada and $263.2 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $426 million, against a production budget of $100 million.[3] As of 2013, Django Unchained is Tarantino's highest-grossing film, surpassing his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, which grossed $321.4 million worldwide.[61]
In North America, the film made $15 million on Christmas Day, finishing second behind fellow opener Les Misérables.[62] It was the third-biggest opening day figure for a film on Christmas, following Sherlock Holmes ($24.6 million) and Les Misérables ($18.1 million).[63] It went on to make $30.1 million in its opening weekend (a six-day total of $63.4 million), finishing second behind holdover The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.[64]
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 87% based on 291 reviews, and an average rating of 8/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Bold, bloody, and stylistically daring, Django Unchained is another incendiary masterpiece from Quentin Tarantino."[65] Metacritic, which assigns a rating to reviews, gives the film a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[66] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.[67]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and said: "The film offers one sensational sequence after another, all set around these two intriguing characters who seem opposites but share pragmatic, financial and personal issues." Ebert also added, "had I not been prevented from seeing it sooner because of an injury, this would have been on my year's best films list."[68] Peter Bradshaw, film critic for The Guardian, awarded the film five stars, writing: "I can only say Django delivers, wholesale, that particular narcotic and delirious pleasure that Tarantino still knows how to confect in the cinema, something to do with the manipulation of surfaces. It's as unwholesome, deplorable and delicious as a forbidden cigarette."[11]
Writing in The New York Times, critic A. O. Scott compared Django to Tarantino's earlier Inglourious Basterds: "Like Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness." Designating the film a Times "critics" pick, Scott said Django is "a troubling and important movie about slavery and racism."[69] Filmmaker Michael Moore praised Django, tweeting that the movie "is one of the best film satires ever."[70] Dan Jolin of Empire magazine praised DiCaprio's performance, saying he "plays [the role of Candie] to hateful perfection: a spiteful, brown-toothed bully, avaricious, vain and prone to flattery", but criticized Foxx as a comparatively weak link whose "soft, musical voice [...] jars against Django's terse deliveries".[71]
To the contrary, Owen Gleiberman, film critic for the Entertainment Weekly, wrote: "Django isn't nearly the film that Inglourious was. It's less clever, and it doesn't have enough major characters – or enough of Tarantino's trademark structural ingenuity – to earn its two-hour-and-45-minute running time."[72] In his review for the Indy Week, David Fellerath wrote: "Django Unchained shows signs that Tarantino did little research beyond repeated viewings of Sergio Corbucci's 1966 spaghetti Western Django and a blaxploitation from 1975 called Boss Nigger, written by and starring Fred Williamson."[73] New Yorker's Anthony Lane was "disturbed by their [Tarantino's fans'] yelps of triumphant laughter, at the screening I attended, as a white woman was blown away by Django's guns."[74]
An entire issue of the academic journal Safundi was devoted to Django Unchained in "Django Unchained and the Global Western," featuring scholars who contextualize Tarantino's film as a classic "western".[75] Dana Phillips writes: "Tarantino's film is immensely entertaining, not despite but because it is so very audacious—even, at times, downright lurid, thanks to its treatment of slavery, race relations, and that staple of the Western, violence. No doubt these are matters that another director would have handled more delicately, and with less stylistic excess, than Tarantino, who has never been bashful. Another director also would have been less willing to proclaim his film the first in a new genre, the 'Southern'."[76]
Top ten lists
Django Unchained was listed on many critics' top ten lists of 2012.[77]
- Top 10 (ranked alphabetically) – Claudia Puig, USA Today
- Top 10 (ranked alphabetically) – Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Top 10 (ranked alphabetically) – Stephanie Zacharek, Film.com
- 1st – Amy Nicholson, Movieline
- 2nd – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
- 2nd – Drew McWeeny, Hitfix
- 2nd – Michelle Orange, The Village Voice
- 2nd – Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club
- 2nd – Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times (tied with Lincoln)
- 3rd – Richard Jameson, MSN Movies
- 3rd – Alan Scherstuhl, The Village Voice
- 4th – Mark Mohan, The Oregonian
- 4th – Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News
- 4th – James Rocchi, MSN Movies
- 4th – Kristopher Tapley, HitFix
- 4th – Drew Taylor & Caryn James, Indiewire
- 5th - The Huffington Post
- 5th – David Ehrlich, Movies.com
- 5th – Scott Foundas, The Village Voice
- 5th – Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
- 6th – James Berardinelli, Reelviews
- 6th – Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post
- 6th – Kat Murphy, MSN Movies
- 6th – Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times
- 6th – Mike Scott, The Times-Picayune
- 7th – Drew Hunt, Chicago Reader
- 7th – A.O. Scott, The New York Times
- 8th – Ty Burr, The Boston Globe
- 9th – Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter
- 10th – Karina Longworth, The Village Voice
- 10th – Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
- 10th – Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast
- 10th – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Accolades
Django Unchained garnered several awards and nominations. The American Film Institute named it one of its Top Ten Movies of the Year in December 2012.[78] The film received five Golden Globe Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Best Director and Best Screenplay for Tarantino. Tarantino won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.[79][80] Christoph Waltz received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor, and the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor, his second time receiving all three awards, having previously won for his role in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.[81][82][83] The NAACP Image Awards gave the film four nominations, while the National Board of Review named DiCaprio their Best Supporting Actor.[84][85] Django Unchained earned a nomination for Best Theatrical Motion Picture from the Producers Guild of America.[86]
