Box office During its theatrical run,
1941 earned $23.4 million in theatrical rentals from the United States and Canada. Because
1941 grossed significantly less than
Jaws and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the film has been erroneously thought to be a box office disaster, but in actuality,
1941 grossed $90 million worldwide and returned a profit, making it a success.
Critical reaction Gene Siskel of the
Chicago Tribune gave the film two and a half out of four stars and applauded the film's visual effects, but stated "[T]here is so much flab here, including endless fistfights and huge dance production numbers that become meaningless after a few minutes." In his review for
The New York Times,
Vincent Canby wrote "There are too many characters who aren't immediately comic. There are too many simultaneous actions that necessitate a lot of cross-cutting, and cross-cutting between unrelated anecdotes can kill a laugh faster than a yawn. Everything is too big...The slapstick gags, obviously choreographed with extreme care, do not build to boffs; they simply go on too long. I'm not sure if it's the fault of the director or of the editor, but I've seldom seen a comedy more ineptly timed." Similarly,
Variety labeled the movie as "long on spectacle, but short on comedy," further stating that "
1941 suffers from Spielberg's infatuation with physical comedy, even when the gags involve tanks, planes and submarines, rather than the usual stuff of screen hijinks. Pic is so overstuffed with visual humor of a rather monstrous nature that feeling emerges, once you've seen 10 explosions, you've seen them all."
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times gave the film one and a half stars out of four, writing that the film "feels forced together chaotically, as if the editors wanted to keep the material moving at any cost. The movie finally reduces itself to an assault on our eyes and ears, a nonstop series of climaxes, screams, explosions, double-takes, sight gags, and ethnic jokes that's finally just not very funny." He labeled the film's central problem as having been "never thought through on a basic level of character and story."
Charles Champlin, reviewing for the
Los Angeles Times, commented "If
1941 is angering (and you may well suspect that it is), it is because the film seems merely an expensive indulgence, begat by those who know how to say it, if only they had something to say."
Dave Kehr of
The Chicago Reader called it "a chattering wind-up toy of a movie [that] blows its spring early on. The characters are so crudely drawn that the film seems to have no human base whatsoever...the people in it are unremittingly foolish, and the physical comedy quickly degenerates into childish destructiveness." Years later, the film would be re-appraised by critics like
Richard Brody of
The New Yorker, who claimed it was "the movie in which [Spielberg] came nearest to cutting loose" and "the only movie where he tried to go past where he knew he could...its failure, combined with his need for success, inhibited him maybe definitively."
Jonathan Rosenbaum of
The Chicago Reader would hail
1941 as Spielberg's best film until 2001's
A.I. Artificial Intelligence, writing that he was impressed by the virtuosity of
1941 and argued that its "honest mean-spiritedness and teenage irreverence" struck him as "closer to Spielberg's soul" than more popular and celebrated works like
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and
The Color Purple. According to
Jack Nicholson, director
Stanley Kubrick allegedly told Spielberg that
1941 was "great, but not funny." Spielberg joked at one point that he considered converting
1941 into a
musical halfway into production and mused that "in retrospect, that might have helped." In a 1990 interview with British film pundit
Barry Norman, Spielberg admitted that the mixed reception to
1941 was one of the biggest lessons of his career, citing personal arrogance that had gotten in the way after the runaway success of
Jaws and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He also regretted not ceding control of
1941s action and miniature sequences (such as the Ferris wheel collapse in the film's finale) to second unit directors and model units, something which he would do in his next film,
Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also said "Some people think that was an out-of-control production, but it wasn't. What happened on the screen was pretty out of control, but the production was pretty much in control. I don't dislike the movie at all. I'm not embarrassed by it — I just think that it wasn't funny enough." On the
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 39%, based on 28 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10. The critical consensus reads, "Steven Spielberg's attempt at screwball comedy collapses under a glut of ideas, confusing an unwieldy scope for a commensurate amount of guffaws." On
Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 34 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. ==Accolades==