Twin Peaks

Fire Walk With Me was greeted at the Cannes Film Festival with booing from the audience and met with almost unanimously negative reviews. Even the CIBY-2000 party at Cannes did not go well. According to Lynch, Francis Bouygues (then head of CIBY) was not well liked in France and this only added to the film’s demise at the festival. The film flopped in the United States, partially because it was released almost a year after the television series was cancelled (due to a sharp ratings decline in the second season) and partially due to its incomprehensibility to the uninitiated. Many people, especially critics, found the film stylish but bewildering. Janet Maslin in her review for the New York Times wrote, "Mr. Lynch’s taste for brain-dead grotesque has lost its novelty." Fellow Times film critic Vincent Canby concurred, "It's not the worst movie ever made; it just seems to be." In his review for Variety magazine, Todd McCarthy said, "that Laura Palmer, after all the talk, is not a very interesting or compelling character and long before the climax has become a tiresome teenager." The film also disappointed many devotees of the TV series due to its darker tone, lack of humor and absence of resolution to the series’ cliff-hanger ending.

U.S. distributor New Line Cinema released the film in America on August 28, 1992 with no advanced press screenings which did not endear it with critics. However, Kim Newman gave the film one of its rare positive reviews in Sight & Sound magazine. "The film’s many moments of horror...demonstrate just how tidy, conventional and domesticated the generic horror movie of the 1980s and 1990s has become." In its opening weekend, Fire Walk With Me grossed a total of $1,813,559 in 691 theaters. As of April 3, 2007, the film has grossed a total of $4,160,851 in North America.

According to the film’s cinematographer, Ron Garcia, the film was very popular in Japan -- in particular, with women, as Martha Nochimson wrote in her book on Lynch's movies, "He surmises that the enthusiasm of the Japanese women comes from a gratification of seeing in Laura some acknowledgment of their suffering in a repressive society." In retrospect, Lynch felt bad that the film "did no business and that a lot of people hate the film. I really like the film. But it had a lot of baggage with it." The film’s editor Mary Sweeney said, "They so badly wanted it to be like the T.V. show, and it wasn’t. It was a David Lynch feature. And people were very angry about it. They felt betrayed." Lee is very proud of the film, saying, "I have had many people, victims of incest, approach me since the film was released, so glad that it had been made because it helped them to release a lot."

After Fire Walk with Me was released, Lynch reportedly planned a second prequel, possibly utilizing footage edited out of the first movie. However, in a 2001 interview he said that the Twin Peaks franchise is “dead as a doornail.”

Fire Walk With Me holds a 59 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.