Mexican Hit ‘Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos’ Opens Today in the U.S.

After two weeks as the number one film in Mexican theaters, Pantelion Films’ Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos (A Rooster with Many Eggs) will begin its U.S. run today — but it won’t be in English. For the first two weeks of its American run, the PG-13 rated film will screen in Spanish with English subtitles, before switching to an English-dub for the remainder of its run.

Opening in 395 theaters (see full theater list), Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos is the first Mexican animated feature to receive wide theatrical distribution in the United States, though its theater count remains a fraction of the 3,000-plus theaters typically reserved for American studio releases.

In Mexico, where Gallo opened on August 20, the film has been a major box office draw, pulling down 100 million pesos (almost $6 million) after two weeks in theaters. With over 3 million admissions, it’s Mexico’s highest-grossing locally-produced film of 2015, beating all of that country’s live-action productions this year so far.

Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos is third film proper film from Mexico’s Huevocartoon franchise. How the low-budget CGI feature screens in the United States will be interesting to watch, given that Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos’ hijinks veer toward the raunchy in-jokes that made Huevocartoon’s animated series, and adapted feature films Una Pelicula de Huevos (A Film about Eggs) and Otra Pelicula de Huevos y un Pollo (Another Film about Eggs and a Chicken), a homegrown hit.

Made exclusively in Mexico, Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos could potentially prove to be a hit with America’s sizable Latino audience, which at last count numbered roughly 54 million people, representing around 17 percent of total U.S. population.

“We’ve thought a lot about the international audience,” explained co-director Rodolfo Riva Palacio, who helmed the film, and heads the Heuvocartoon franchise, with his brother, Gabriel. “We made many U.S. references to try to get closer to the culture. Its structure is like The Karate Kid. It has elements of Rocky, The Terminator, [and] The Godfather.”

Los Bros Riva Palacio plan to set up shop in America, where Rodolfo has already resettled, to bring Huevocartoon more into focus for U.S. audiences. For Un Gallo con Muchos Huevos’ first two weeks in America, that focus is intriguingly bilingual.