General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

The Dinner Game

The Dinner Game (Le dîner de cons) is a 1998 French comedy directed, written, and co-written in dialogue by Francis Veber, in which a group of wealthy Parisian friends hold a weekly contest to see who can bring the most spectacular "idiot" to their Wednesday dinner.¹ The film runs 80 minutes, was produced by Alain Poiré for Gaumont and TF1 Films Production, and won three César Awards in 1999.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Le dîner de cons (French)
Director and writer	Francis Veber, adapted from his own stage play¹^•³
French release	15 April 1998, 80 minutes²
Principal cast	Thierry Lhermitte (Pierre Brochant), Jacques Villeret (François Pignon), Francis Huster, Daniel Prévost, Catherine Frot¹
César Awards (1999)	Best Actor (Villeret), Best Supporting Actor (Prévost), Best Screenplay (Veber); six nominations in total²
Budget	FRF 82,000,000 (estimated)⁴
Reception	73% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (45 reviews); 7.6/10 on IMDb from about 47,000 votes⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Every Wednesday, the publisher Pierre Brochant and his friends hold a "dîner de cons," literally a "dinner of idiots": each guest must bring along a person he finds particularly dull, obtuse, or annoying, and the winner is the man who has found the most spectacular fool.⁷ On the evening the film covers, Brochant believes he has found a champion, "the world champion idiot": François Pignon, an accountant at the Finance Ministry who builds models out of matchsticks.¹

The dinner never happens for Brochant. He injures his back playing golf and cannot attend, and he has not been able to cancel his guest, so Pignon stays at his apartment.⁷ The same evening, Brochant learns that his wife is leaving him.⁸ Pignon, trying to help, complicates each of Brochant's problems in turn, and the comedy develops as a series of escalating catastrophes inside a single apartment.¹ The Quebec film board's description notes the vaudeville structure: the confrontation of two characters at opposite poles, in which "the stupidest one is not the one you think."⁸

From stage to screen

Veber, the French writer-director who had written the screenplay of La Cage aux Folles, first staged Le Dîner de Cons in 1993 under the title translated as "Dinner for Idiots."³ The play was a success in Paris, and the theater database records its run at the Théâtre des Variétés from 9 August 1994 to 31 December 1995, directed by Pierre Mondy, with Jacques Villeret in the cast and Molière nominations in 1995 for Villeret, Gérard Hernandez, and Veber as author.⁹ A theater company dossier states that from its 1993 creation the play met with immense success.¹⁰

Veber adapted the play for the screen five years later. The film is shorter than the stage version, about an hour and a half against two hours, and the adaptation changed some character details; in the original play, Marlène tells Pignon she is Brochant's sister, while the film gives her the surname Sasseur and renames Brochant's doctor.¹¹ Thierry Lhermitte said in a 1998 interview that Veber, as both screenwriter and director, worked to a script "written to the last comma," with no improvisation.¹²

Reception and awards

The film was a commercial hit in France. AlloCiné records a budget of 50,000,000 EUR and a spectator rating of 4.3 out of 5 from more than 86,000 votes.¹¹ In the United States it was an art-house release distributed by Lions Gate, grossing $4,071,548.⁴^•³

At the 1999 César ceremony the film received six nominations and three awards: Best Actor for Jacques Villeret, Best Supporting Actor for Daniel Prévost, and Best Original Screenplay, Adaptation and Dialogue for Francis Veber; it was also nominated for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Frot).² Villeret and Veber also won Lumière Awards in 1999 for Best Actor and Best Screenplay, and the film was nominated for the 2000 Goya for Best European Film.¹³^•¹² Critics have remained favorable: the Tomatometer stands at 73% from 45 reviews, while the audience Popcornmeter is at 90%.⁵ A 2018 festival catalog called it "an international cult classic" and noted that it alone took three Césars on release.¹⁴

Remakes

The premise has been remade several times: Bheja Fry (2007) in India, April Fool (2010), and Dinner for Schmucks (2010), the American version directed by Jay Roach and starring Steve Carell and Paul Rudd.⁴^•³ The American remake added a third act containing the titular dinner itself, which the French film never shows; shooting began in the fall of 2009, sixteen years after the stage play debuted.³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 1995 to 1999 › Black and satirical comedies › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?