The film received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised its story and humor. It grossed $141 million against a budget of $19 million, becoming the highest-grossing R-rated animated film at the time until it was surpassed by Demon Slayer: Mugen Train in 2020. A streaming series based on the film, Sausage Party: Foodtopia, is scheduled for release in July 2024.
Plot
Unbeknownst to humans, a supermarket called Shopwell's is populated by anthropomorphic grocery items that believe that the human shoppers are gods, who take groceries they have purchased to a utopia known as the "Great Beyond". Among the groceries in the store is a sausage named Frank, who dreams of living there with his hot dog bun girlfriend, Brenda, and finally consummating their relationship.
After Frank and Brenda's packages are chosen by a departing female shopper, a returned jar of honey mustard tries to warn the groceries that the Great Beyond is a lie; nobody listens except for Frank. Honey Mustard calls on Frank to seek out a bottle of liquor named Firewater, before committing suicide by falling off the cart. This creates an accidental cart collision that causes Frank, Brenda and several groceries to fall out, including an aggressive douche who gets his nozzle bent and plots revenge against Frank and Brenda for his plight.
Seeking to verify Honey Mustard's warning, Frank leads Brenda, a lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash and a bagel named Sammy Bagel Jr. to the store's liquor aisle under the pretense of taking a shortcut to their proper aisles. There, he meets Firewater and his colleagues, box of grits Mr. Grits and Twinkie Twink, who call themselves the Non-Perishables. After smoking cannabis with the trio, Frank learns from Firewater that they created the story of the Great Beyond as a noble lie to assuage former inhabitants' fears of being eaten by shoppers. Frank, vowing to reveal the truth, is encouraged to travel beyond the store's freezer section to find proof. While waiting for Frank, Brenda and the others are led into the Mexican aisle by a bottle of tequila who is secretly working for Douche and meet Teresa del Taco, a taco shell who falls in love with Brenda on sight and helps them escape.
Meanwhile, Frank's two best friends, Carl and Barry, are horrified as they witness the other purchased foods being cooked and eaten by the shopper, shown from their perspective as a brutal slaughtering. They try to escape out a window, but only Barry succeeds as Carl is stabbed and sliced in half by the shopper. Barry then stumbles across a human drug addict, who becomes able to communicate with his groceries, one of them being a Stephen Hawking-like wad of chewing gum named Gum, after he injects himself with bath salts. After unsuccessfully attempting to cook Barry after its effects wear off, the addict is decapitated in a domestic accident.
After Frank separates from his friends, who disapprove of his skepticism of the Great Beyond, he discovers a cookbook behind the freezer section and reveals its contents to the rest of Shopwell's inhabitants. Initially panicking, the groceries choose not to believe Frank out of fear of losing their sense of purpose, prompting Frank to lash out at them for their blind belief. Barry and other groceries from the addict's home return to the store with his severed head, revealing that the humans can be killed. The groceries are able to drug the human shoppers and employees using toothpicks laced with bath salts. When the drugged humans begin attacking the groceries, Frank convinces everyone to listen to him and join the fight against them.
A store-wide battle ensues with the humans getting gruesomely murdered. Douche, who has absorbed the contents of many beverage-related groceries to repair his nozzle, takes control of the store's manager, Darren, by inserting himself into his anus and pulling on his scrotum to puppeteer his actions. Once they catch Frank, Douche bites his torso. Barry and the inhabitants then launch a rocket at Douche and Darren made from propane tanks and a garbage bin used to dispose of expired foods, killing them both right after Brenda rescues Frank.
With the battle over, the inhabitants celebrate their victory with a massive orgy. Later, Frank and his friends meets Firewater and Gum, who have had a psychedelic experience and discovered that their world is not real; they are merely cartoon characters voiced by famous actors in another dimension. Gum has constructed a portal to this dimension and the heroes decide to travel there to confront their creators.
Danny McBride as a jar of honey mustard who is returned to his shelf upon the shopper who purchased him mistaking him for regular mustard and tries to warn Frank and the other products of the reality of the "Great Beyond" before committing suicide[16]
Paul Rudd as Darren, the manager of Shopwell's who is nicknamed the "dark lord" as he disposes of expired food and spilled items[16]
Nick Kroll as Douche, a nasty and foul-mouthed douche and Frank's arch-nemesis who seeks revenge on Frank for accidentally breaking his nozzle and preventing him from reaching the "Great Beyond"[14][15]
Edward Norton as Sammy Bagel Jr., a neurotic Jewish bagel who has an on-and-off rivalry and became best friend with Lavash whose name is a play on Sammy Davis Jr.[12][14][15]
Salma Hayek as Teresa del Taco, a Mexican lesbian taco who is attracted to Brenda[14][17]
Scott Diggs Underwood as:
Gum, an intelligent but paraplegic wad of chewed gum who wears glasses and has a mechanized wheelchair. He is a parody of Stephen Hawking.
Twink, a gay Twinkie who is a member of the Non-Perishables
A half-eaten slice of pizza
Krinkler's Chips
Anders Holm as Troy, a sausage who likes to pick on Barry
Rogen has said that he worked for eight years to get the film made but the content worried most film studios.[19] Noting that the film came from "an innocent place", Rogen stated that "'What would it be like if our food had feelings?' We very quickly realized that it would be fucked up."[20] Goldberg revealed the project to Indiewire in July 2010, stating it was a "top secret super project". Initially, Indiewire was skeptical that the project was real and not a hoax on Goldberg's part, but after vetting, it did confirm that it was in the works.[13] In November 2010, Hill independently confirmed to MTV News that he was working on an R-rated3D animated film.[21] Goldberg and executive producer James Weaver said that they had specific targets—Disney and Pixar and DreamWorks Animation films, which they have "ripped apart". Goldberg said, "we're just kind of taking all the conventions of children's movies, and making them disgusting and insane".[12]
When Rogen originally submitted the film to the Motion Picture Association of America, they gave it an NC-17 rating due to the visibility of pubic hair on Lavash's scrotum during the climactic food orgy scene. Once said pubic hair was removed, the film received its final R rating for "strong crude sexual content, pervasive language and drug use".[24][25][26][27] The film was granted a −12 certificate by France's film classification commission, which was criticized by Catholic groups in the country.[28] The British Board of Film Classification classified the film at 15.[2]
Sausage Party was originally set for release on June 3, 2016, but was pushed back to August 12, 2016. A rough cut of the film was shown at the South by Southwest Film Festival on March 14, 2016.[11] The final cut of the film screened at Just for Laughs on July 30, 2016.[29] It premiered one final time in Westwood before the film was theatrically released in the United States on August 12, 2016.[30] The film was released in the United Kingdom on September 2, 2016.[31]
The Sausage Partytrailer was accidentally shown in a theatre during a screening of Finding Dory, leading some parents to believe that Sausage Party was a children's film. It took several minutes before the cinema employees fixed the mistake.[32]
Box office
Sausage Party grossed $97.7 million in North America and $42.8 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $141.3 million, against a budget of $19 million.[7] The film was the highest-grossing R-rated animated film of all time, replacing South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (which held the record for 17 years),[33] and made a net profit of $47.06 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues,[34] until it was surpassed in 2020 by Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, with an estimated $506,523,013.[citation needed]
In the United States and Canada, Sausage Party was released on August 12, 2016, alongside Pete's Dragon and Florence Foster Jenkins, and was initially projected to gross $15–20 million from 2,805 theaters in its opening weekend.[5] However, after grossing $3.3 million from Thursday night previews (more than the $1.7 million made by Rogen's Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising in May) and $13.5 million on its first day, weekend projections were increased to $30–35 million. The film ultimately grossed $33.6 million in its opening weekend, finishing second at the box office, behind Suicide Squad.[35]
Outside North America, the biggest markets are the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Germany, Russia and Israel, where the film grossed $10.2 million, $6.8 million, $4.1 million, $3.5 million $2.6 million and $2 million, respectively.[36]
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82%, based on 239 reviews, with an average rating of 6.80/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Sausage Party is definitely offensive, but backs up its enthusiastic profanity with an impressively high laugh-to-gag ratio—and a surprisingly thought-provoking storyline."[38] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 66 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[39] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[35][40]
Vince Mancini of Uproxx wrote that "Sausage Party's most charming quality is that it feels exactly like a group of 13-year-olds trying to entertain themselves, with excessive C-bombs and constant groan-worthy food puns."[41]Richard Roeper gave the film three out of four stars, saying, "Despite all the cursing and envelope-pushing and bat-bleep crazy sexual stuff, Sausage Party isn't mean-spirited. It's just... stupid. But also pretty smart. And funny as hell."[42] Lindsey Bahr of Associated Press gave the film a positive review, writing, "There is no one out there making comedies quite like Rogen and Goldberg. They are putting their definitive stamp on the modern American comedy one decency-smashing double entendre at a time."[43]
Work conditions
After the film's release, controversy emerged after anonymous comments attributed to the animators on a Cartoon Brew article suggested that the animators at Nitrogen Studios worked under poor conditions and were forced by co-director Greg Tiernan to work overtime for free. A total of 36 of the 83 animators were blacklisted and went uncredited in the film, believed to be due to their complaints; comments made in anonymous interviews by some of the animators involved in the project by Variety,The Washington Post and The Hollywood Reporter alleged that the comments were accurate. All the animators in the film were reportedly told outright that they would be blacklisted if they did not work overtime without pay.[44][45][46] In late March 2019, the British Columbia Employment Standards Branch ruled that workers were entitled to receive overtime pay for their work on the film.[47]
Rogen has expressed interests in making a sequel to Sausage Party and more animated films aimed for adults. When asked about the possibility of a sequel, Rogen stated: "It's something we talk about, yeah. That's one of the reasons why we took away the [original] ending[57] because we thought, well, if that was the first scene of the next movie it's probably not what you would want it to be, with them just seeing us and finding us basically. But the idea of a live-action/animated movie, like a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-style hybrid, is also very exciting, mostly because Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is one of my favorite movies of all time."[58]
Frank and Brenda, the two main characters of the film, made guest appearances in the mobile fighting gameSausage Legend, released by Milkcorp for iOS and Android, as part of a limited special event that ran from March 6 through July 31, 2017. As this game involves dueling with sausages, players in this game can unlock and control Brenda, who swings Frank around to battle other sausages.[61]
