Editing Monty Python's Life of Brian (section)

==Release==
For the original British and Australian releases, a spoof travelogue narrated by John Cleese, ''Away from It All'', was shown before the film itself. It consisted mostly of stock travelogue footage and featured arch comments from Cleese. For instance, a shot of Bulgarian girls in ceremonial dresses was accompanied by the comment "Hard to believe, isn't it, that these simple happy folk are dedicated to the destruction of Western civilisation as we know it!", [[People's Republic of Bulgaria|Communist Bulgaria]] being a member of the [[Warsaw Pact]] at the time. Not only was this a spoof of travelogues ''per se'', it was a protest against the then common practice in Britain of showing cheaply made banal short features before a main feature.

''Life of Brian'' opened on 17 August 1979 in five North American theatres and grossed US$140,034 ($28,007 per screen) in its opening weekend. Its total gross was $19,398,164. It was the highest grossing British film in North America that year. Released on 8 November 1979 in the UK,<ref>{{cite news |first=Robert |last=Sellers |url=https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/mar/28/artsfeatures1 |title=Welease Bwian |newspaper=[[The Guardian]] |date=28 March 2003 |access-date=29 April 2020 }}</ref> the film was the fourth highest-grossing film in Britain in 1979. In London, it opened at the Plaza cinema and grossed £40,470 in its opening week.<ref>{{cite magazine|magazine=[[Variety (magazine)|Variety]]|date=21 November 1979|page=43|title='Brian' Wow 85G Sets London B.O. Pace; 'Max' Neat $47,133}}</ref>

On 30 April 2004, ''Life of Brian'' was re-released on five North American screens to "cash in" (as Terry Jones put it)<ref name="Python's Jones Passionate About 'Life Of Brian's' Return" /> on the box office success of [[Mel Gibson]]'s ''[[The Passion of the Christ]]''. It grossed $26,376 ($5,275 per screen) in its opening weekend. It ran until October 2004, playing at 28 screens at its widest point, eventually grossing $646,124 during its re-release. By comparison, a re-release of ''[[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]]'' had earned $1.8 million three years earlier. A DVD of the film was also released that year.