succès d'estime

But that didn’t make it a succès d’estime.

Still, it was more succès d’estime than moneymaker.

The show became the succès d’estime and de scandale of the London season, and in 1965 moved from the West End to Broadway.

Writing about “Heaven’s Gate” in 2012, the New Yorker critic Richard Brody suggested that, had the film been released in the Internet age, critics would have turned it into “a succès d’estime, not after 32 years but from the start.”

Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori's show, based on Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir, had many predicting it would be at best a short-lived succès d'estime.