The film soundtrack has been released by Deutsche Grammophon, a rare honor for a french film music. Even rarer, the soundtrack has been released before the film, which has been postponed to 2021 because of the covid situation.
Very unusually for a French blockbuster, it was mainly filmed in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in France, in the Pôle Pixel studio in Villeurbanne (next to Lyon), and on location in the Puy-de-Dôme, Loire, Haute-Loire, Isère and Drôme départements.
The flashbacks and early scenes were shot in the Sultanate of Oman.
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a big Kaamelott fan, brought the entire series set with him on his Alpha mission in 2021, and a petition asking Alexandre Astier to send him the movie made the rounds. The details were worked out and he saw the movie along with his colleagues in the ISS the day after the release in France, as a specific ISS version (in reduced definition and with English subtitles) was made for the occasion and broadcast by the NASA.
After the show ended in 2009 (on a cliffhanger), it was supposed to be quickly followed by a trilogy of movies.
However, a few years later, it was revealed that a legal dispute between the show's creator, Alexandre Astier, and the series production company, CALT, held up everything. The conflict was eventually resolved in 2015, and shooting was expected to start in 2016, then in 2017, then in 2018, until it was made clear that financing the movie took more time than expected.
Shooting finally started in January 2019, and the following month, a French release date of October 14th 2020 was given. In early 2020, the release date was shifted to July 29th 2020, but the pandemic forced it back to the fall (November 25th 2020), and when the second wave hit, it got delayed to July 21st 2021, on which date it was actually released, 12 years after the end of the show! It also ironically ended up being the start date in France for the vaccine pass requirements for moviegoers.
The hype was so big in France that the movie broke the ticket presale records for a French movie: 60,000 in 24 hours.
Many "avant premières" were set up the day before the release (and before the start of the vaccine pass restrictions in movie theaters), which is highly unusual. They ended up with 307,899 tickets sold, and the first day brought an extra 116,023 tickets, totaling 423,922 tickets, which was the best opening for a French movie since La Ch'tite Famille in 2018 - which didn't open during a pandemic, nor the day when the vaccine pass began.
For its first week, the film easily won first place at the box office with more a million tickets, and kept his place at the top for the second week with half a million more tickets, besting newcomers Jungle Cruise and The Suicide Squad.