Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates critical reviews, showed the film at approximately seventy-two percent positive on the basis of twenty-five reviews at the time of the re-release. The positive reviews tended to acknowledge the film’s incoherence as a conventional narrative while recognizing the genuinely extraordinary visual experience of watching large cats in direct physical contact with human performers. The negative reviews noted that extraordinary behind-the-scenes circumstances do not translate automatically into a compelling film.
Jan de Bont, whose 220-suture scalping during the production was among the most severe individual injuries documented, subsequently went on to direct Speed (1994) and Twister (1996), two of the higher-grossing commercial action films of the mid-1990s. His trajectory from Roar to Hollywood’s mainstream provides one of the more improbable biographical through-lines of the production.
## Advocacy and Legislation
The experience of the Roar production and its aftermath shaped the specific character of Tippi Hedren’s subsequent advocacy work. She had acquired large cats as part of a film project and found herself, after the film’s completion, responsible for their care for the duration of their lives. The experience of managing the Shambala Preserve — of understanding what the long-term care of large predators actually required, the costs, the veterinary demands, the space requirements, the behavioral complexities — gave her a practical knowledge of the issues surrounding private ownership of big cats that was different from the abstract knowledge of an animal rights advocate who had not lived with the animals.
The legislative effort she became associated with focused specifically on private ownership: the practice of individuals purchasing big cat cubs as pets, a practice that was, during the decades when she was most active in advocating against it, legal in many states and subject to inconsistent regulation across the country. The cub petting industry — in which people paid to hold and photograph lion and tiger cubs in various commercial settings — was a related problem, because it relied on a continuous supply of cubs and created an incentive to breed large cats in captivity for commercial purposes.