The film was produced in part by West German television station "Hessischer Rundfunk", which televised the film on the same day it opened in theatres. Herzog has blamed this for the relatively poor commercial reception of the film in Germany. However, outside Germany the film became an "enormous cult favorite" in "such places as Mexico, Venezuela, and Algiers." The film had a theatrical run of fifteen months in Paris. "Aguirre" received a theatrical release in the United States in 1977 by New Yorker Films. It immediately became a cult film, and New Yorker Films reported four years after its initial release that it was the only film in its catalog that never went out of circulation.