The film received mixed-to-negative critical notices at the time of its initial release. Variety, reviewing it in 1981, acknowledged its conservation message but criticized the narrative coherence, the dialogue, and the editing. Other critics noted that the experience of watching real humans in genuine proximity to real large cats — which was undeniable as a visual phenomenon — could not compensate for the absence of conventional dramatic structure. The film’s worldwide gross was under two million dollars, against the seventeen million dollars it had cost to make. Marshall never directed another film. Hedren and Marshall divorced in 1982.
The animals, however, needed to go somewhere.
## After the Film: The Shambala Preserve
The specific problem that the Roar production had created — aside from the debt, the injuries, and the ended marriage — was the large cats themselves. By the time filming concluded, the property in Acton housed dozens of lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cougars, and other cats, as well as the elephant Timbo. These animals had lived their lives in proximity to humans. They could not be returned to the wild, because they lacked the hunting skills and territorial knowledge that wild large cats require. They could not simply be dispersed — the network of zoos, circuses, and private facilities that might have accepted them had limits, and the animals had become the specific responsibility of the people who had brought them into this unusual situation.
Tippi Hedren founded the nonprofit Roar Foundation in 1983 to care for the animals. The organization established and maintained the Shambala Preserve, an approximately eighty-acre habitat in Acton, California, as a permanent sanctuary for rescued and surplus big cats. Shambala is a Sanskrit word meaning a place of peace and harmony. The preserve’s location in Acton — the same desert community in Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley where the Roar ranch had been located — meant that the infrastructure of the production, such as it was, could be redirected toward the longer-term purpose of animal care.