The Adventures of Baron Munchausen - Release

Release

United States

When The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was finally completed, David Puttnam, who had originally got the film's distribution rights in the US for Columbia Pictures, had been replaced as CEO of Columbia; coupled with Gilliam's prior quarrels with major studios over Brazil, the film saw only very limited distribution in the US, earning $8 million in US box office.

In Madness and Misadventures, Robin Williams commented about the low number of copies released by Columbia:

regime was leaving, the new one was going through this, and they said, "This was their movies, now let's do our movies!" It was a bit like the new lion that comes in and kills all the cubs from the previous man.

In a 2000 interview with IGN, Gilliam said about the contemporary press perception of the film being a financial disaster how "It seemed actually appropriate that Munchausen – the greatest liar in the world – should be a victim of some of the greatest liars in the world." He compared the film's budget problems to the even more serious problems of We're No Angels that commonly go unmentioned, and he went on to declare its difficulties as a mixture of "trade press" still being upset about Gilliam's battle with Universal over Brazil, nepotism, and an intrigue on behalf of Ray Stark successfully trying to have Puttnam removed from Columbia, coupled with the fact the studio was being sold at the time:

The negative stories about the shoot that were turning up in the Hollywood press were coming, we found out later, from a source at Film Finances – which was the completion bond company on the film. Their lawyer was a guy named Steve Ransohoff, whose father was Martin Ransohoff – who was Ray Stark's friend and partner. I thought it was quite extraordinary, because the stories were doing two things – they were making me and the whole project look like it was completely out of control and all my fault, and that Film Finance, the completion guarantors, were the only thing holding it together – the people trying to bring control to it... the fact was, they were absolutely useless.

The ultimate fact was that when the film was ultimately released, there were only 117 prints made for America – so it was never really released. 117 prints! ...an art film gets 400. We were ultimately the victim of Columbia Tri-Star being sold to Sony, because at that time all they were doing was trying to get the books looking as good as possible. We weren't the only film that suffered, but we were the most visible one. And what happened – to complete the story in a neat and tidy way – was that they were not spending any money on advertising to promote any of the movies started by the previous regime – by Putnam's regime. They were burying films left right and center by spending no money on them – and the books looked really good at the end of that. The joke is, if you look back, we got the best reviews and we were doing the best business in the opening weeks of any film they had released since Last Emperor. We actually opened well in the big cities – we opened really well. A friend who had bought the video rights said he had never seen anything so weird – Columbia was spending their whole time looking at exit polls to prove the film would not work in the suburbs, and so it would be pointless to make any more prints. He said, "I've never seen anything like this." There it was. Then it becomes this kind of legend – which it deserves to be... even if it's the wrong legend.

Europe

The film fared substantially better in Europe, where distributors such as Germany's Neue Constantin Film were able to give it a more appropriate release, and subsequently on home video, actually in 1999 becoming the very first feature DVD issued by Columbia.