General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods

Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods (French: Astérix – Le Domaine des Dieux, also released as Asterix and Obelix: Mansion of the Gods) is a 2014 French-Belgian 3D animated comedy film directed by Louis Clichy and Alexandre Astier, adapted from the comic album Le Domaine des Dieux by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, the seventeenth book in the Asterix series¹^•². In the story, Julius Caesar, unable to defeat the last independent Gaulish village by force, builds a luxury Roman residential complex beside it to seduce the villagers into Roman civilization³. It was the ninth animated adaptation of the Asterix comics and the first made entirely in computer-generated imagery⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Directors	Louis Clichy and Alexandre Astier; screenplay by Astier²
Source	The 17th Asterix album, Le Domaine des Dieux, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo¹
French release	26 November 2014, distributed by SND; CNC visa 128634; 85 min; "Tous publics"²
Production	M6 Studio, with coproduction by Belvision (Belgium), M6 Films, and SNC; animation by Mikros Image⁵^•⁴
Budget	€31,031,499⁶
France box office	2,996,184 admissions¹
Worldwide gross	$42,830,578, all from international markets⁷
Principal voices	Roger Carel (Astérix), Guillaume Briat (Obélix), Lorànt Deutsch (Anglaigus), Laurent Lafitte (Duplicatha), Alain Chabat (Prospectus), Florence Foresti (Bonemine)⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The film is set in Gaul in 50 BC, where the whole country has been conquered by Rome except one village of indomitable Gauls. Exasperated, Julius Caesar changes tactics: since his armies cannot impose themselves by force, Roman civilization itself will seduce the Gauls. He has a luxury residential estate for Roman property owners, the Domain of the Gods, built next to the village¹. Asterix and Obelix do everything they can to thwart the plan, but the buildings rise and the first Roman tenants arrive, whose way of life increasingly appeals to the villagers, some of whom begin to imagine living in the estate themselves³^•⁴. Understanding that force will not help him this time, Asterix devises a subtler strategy to make Caesar's plan fail⁹.

Production

Choice of album. M6, which had produced the previous animated feature Asterix and the Vikings, entrusted the project to Alexandre Astier, creator of the comedy series Kaamelott. M6 initially proposed adapting Asterix in Hispania, but Astier chose Le Domaine des Dieux, judging its scenario more interesting for film, notably because Caesar has a genuine plan to destroy the village. He described wanting "a Pixar-style dramaturgy, with risks and cinematic stakes, and multiple layers of reading," in an album that alternates the absurd, the superficial, and the serious⁴^•¹⁰.

Directing team. Astier wrote the screenplay and co-directed with Louis Clichy, a former Pixar animator who had worked on Up and WALL-E and graduated from the French Gobelins school; Clichy in practice handled more of the animation side¹⁰^•¹¹. From idea to finished film, production took four years, with at least 200 people working on the image alone¹².

Animation. Mikros Image Animation Paris produced the animation¹³^•³. The film's animation director spent two years working on faithfully recreating Uderzo's drawings in a three-dimensional context. A small team started in February 2013, the main team arrived in September, and about 20 additional animators joined in Belgium, supervised by five animators who had begun the project in France to ensure continuity; in-house software was added for the project's specific animation needs, and 4,000,000 frames were calculated and rendered during production¹⁴. The directors chose character designs closer to the comic's drawing than to extreme realism¹⁴.

Uderzo's approval. Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, admitted he had feared 3D technology would not bring out the expressions and emotions of his characters. After several months of computer modeling and animation tests, he said he was finally convinced by the work of Louis Clichy and the animation director¹.

Release and box office

The film opened in France on 26 November 2014, classified "Tous publics" (all audiences) by the CNC². Its first week in France drew 842,999 admissions⁶, and the opening made it the third biggest opening for a French animated film at that time¹⁵. It went on to sell 2,996,184 admissions in France¹, and Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of $42,830,578, entirely from international markets, including $26,621,255 in France, $3,673,470 in Germany, and $1,817,227 in Italy⁷. Against its budget of €31,031,499, JP Box-Office calculates a worldwide return of 113 percent⁶.

Home video followed on 31 March 2015 (Blu-ray) and 26 March 2015 (VOD) through M6 Vidéo¹. The film returned to French cinemas on 7 February 2024, alongside a re-release of its successor¹^•⁸.

Reception and place in the series

On AlloCiné the film holds a press rating of 3.7 out of 5 from 27 reviews and a spectator rating of 3.9 from more than 11,000 ratings¹. Le Monde called it a successful operation, noting that the film shows Romans buying fish cheaply from the village fishmonger Ordralfabetix while the Gauls, such as the blacksmith Cétautomatix, do better business than ever with these wealthy, gullible tourists¹⁶.

The film's commercial standing has held up: among French animated films at the French box office, Mikros Animation places Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion (2018) first with close to 4 million entries and Astérix – The Mansion of the Gods second with more than 3 million¹⁷. Its success launched a collaboration between Mikros, Astier, and Clichy that continued with The Secret of the Magic Potion³.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026