Samuel Goldwyn Films is betting on a grand-scale, €74 million French World War II epic to capture U.S. audiences.
Following a rapturous seven-minute standing ovation at the American French Film Festival in Los Angeles, the two-part saga De Gaulle is set for a strategic U.S. release across major markets and transactional VOD.
- The two-part series, De Gaulle: Resistance and De Gaulle: Liberty, will utilize a hybrid theatrical and VOD release model to combat limited U.S. screen counts.
- The production has already achieved success in France with over six million tickets sold and currently stands as the highest-grossing French-language film of the year in the U.K.
- Director Antonin Baudry aims for accessibility, designing the film to be understood by viewers without prior knowledge of the French general’s complex wartime history.
The industry is watching as Peter Goldwyn distributes Antonin Baudry’s World War II epic, betting that its cinematic scale can attract American audiences despite its foreign-language format.
Speaking to Variety, Goldwyn argued that while the language barrier often relegates such films to the arthouse circuit, the scale of this production—comparable to The Odyssey in ambition—demands a broader reach. The strategy involves a single, unified marketing campaign targeting history buffs and students alongside the traditional arthouse demographic.
| Metric | Details |
|---|---|
| Production Budget | €74 Million |
| International Reach | Acquired for release in China (late November) |
| U.S. Release Strategy | Major market theatrical + Nationwide VOD |
The screenplay, written by Antonin Baudry and Bérénice Vila, draws from over 150 historical books to flesh out the tense, often fractured relationship between Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Baudry noted that this geopolitical friction—specifically Roosevelt’s dismissal of the Free France movement as a “fantasy”—remains largely absent from standard historical education, providing a fresh entry point for American viewers accustomed to more singular narratives of the war.
Simon Abkarian, who plays the titular general, opted against a purely anthropological recreation of the leader. Instead, he and Baudry focused on the musicality and internal logic of De Gaulle’s language. “You can’t represent a character like this in a strictly anthropological way. You can invoke him, evoke him, but you can’t actually become him,” Abkarian told Variety.
Goldwyn noted that American theaters often lack the patience for a film to build momentum through word-of-mouth in the way it did domestically in France. By pairing limited theatrical runs in cities like New York, Chicago, and Seattle with immediate access via transactional platforms, the distributor hopes to mitigate the risk of a “get in, get out” theatrical window.
The success of this theatrical release will likely depend on whether American audiences, who are already familiar with World War II narratives, are drawn to this specific perspective on the conflict.
As the film prepares for its late November release in China and its early December rollout for the second installment in the U.S., the question remains: Can a story centered on a leader once considered an “isolated military officer” resonate with a modern American public increasingly wary of traditional establishment narratives?
