Several critics booed "The Fountain" at the festival's press screening, while the film received a 10-minute standing ovation at the public screening the following evening. "The Fountain" was released in 1,472 theaters in the United States and Canada on November 22, 2006, a day before the American Thanksgiving holiday. The film earned $3,768,702 in the U.S. and Canadian box office during the opening weekend of November 24. "The Fountain" earned $10,144,010 in the United States and Canada, and $5,761,344 in other territories. The film, which had a production budget of $35 million, grossed $15,978,422 in theaters worldwide. The box-office performance was considered a flop with the film only earning back 54% of its budget. The site's average rating is 5.94/10 and the site's critical consensus states: ""The Fountain"—a movie about metaphysics, universal patterns, Biblical symbolism, and boundless love spread across one thousand years—is visually rich but suffers from its own unfocused ambitions." Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade C- on scale of A to F. "Newsweek" reported how people received the film, "Its supporters admire the film's beauty and daring; its detractors find it overblown and hokey." Michael Atkinson, writing for "Sight & Sound", reviewed Aronofsky's endeavor, "It's difficult to recall another American film that, in pursuing a passionate and personal vision, goes so maddeningly, uproariously wrong." Atkinson said of the narrative, "The erratic and pointless leapfrogging between its storylines is torporific ... all three stories are assembled piecemeal, many of which repeat over and over as flashback and flashforwards." He complained of the numerous motifs, "It's difficult to swallow the amalgamation of Mayan, Biblical, Buddhist, Taoist and New Age iconography, all of it tossed as if into a stew." In contrast, Glenn Kenny of "Premiere" wrote of the film, ""The Fountain" is probably the deftest stories-within-stories narrative film I've seen ... By "The Fountain"s end, the multilayered meta-narrative... resolves (or does it?) into a kind of diegetic Möbius strip, to stunning effect." Kenny called the film "as demanding as it is dazzling" and compared Aronofsky's direction to Stanley Kubrick's "in terms of conceptual audacity and meticulousness of execution."