Interesting-- I've always thought of Dreyer's film as a failure (certainly it is after this film that Dreyer's complete dislocation from any and every studio system begins and his films begin coming, instead of once if not several per year, once every ten years (after the self-produced Vampyr, of course). So if Dreyer's film killed the Gastyne 'stone dead', the Gastyne hardly respired at all!
TheAuteurs quotes allmovie:
It was in France that he made the masterpiece for which he is best remembered, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), a powerful, imperfect chronicle of the final day in the saint’s life. It was here that Dreyer took one of Griffith’s techniques, the close-up, and created effects designed to capture every nuance of the characters’ conscious and subconscious state. This film took the director over 18 months to finish. With this film, Dreyer attempted to keep the story historically accurate in every way: the script was based on actual trial records, the cast wore period clothing sans make-up and jewelry, the film was shot in perfect sequence, and elaborate, expensive sets were constructed, including an enormous castle with sliding walls to facilitate photography. Unfortunately, though critics adored the film (and still do, as it remains one of the most carefully examined and acclaimed films in the history of cinema), it was a box office flop.
From Bright Lights Film Journal:
The Archbishop of Paris’s demand for changes were only the beginning of a series of mutilations. In 1933, the film, which failed at the box office in spite of many glowing reviews, resurfaced in a truncated version (82 minutes cut to 61) featuring the prattlings of a radio announcer, of all things. In 1951, yet another version appeared with different cuts, new subtitles, and interpolated shots of stained glass and other indignities.
Popmatters quotes Tyberg as claiming the opposite of Zazou's
Dictionnaire (I'd have to pull out the dvd and spin it to get the exact quote):
The canonization of Jeanne D’Arc (Joan of Arc) fell into the upheaval of post-World War I France. Although she was always a popular figure of French history, when the Catholic Church recognized Jeanne as a saint in ‘20, assorted media about her life began to appear in the public realm. La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc premiered in Copenhagen in April 1928, but was by no means the only “Jeanne†movie of the time period. A more elaborate movie called La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne D’Arc (The Wonderful Life of Joan of Arc) , directed by Marco de Gastyne, hit the box office at the same time, and essentially drove Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc to the more obscure and “art-house†movie theatres worldwide ("The Criterion Collection: La Passion de Jeanne D’Arcâ€, DVD commentary by Casper Tybjerg).
It's so difficult to get reliable box office figures from this era-- especially accurate global figures-- that this stuff is usually always just beyond the ability to pin down for public knowledge.