Production notes

The film was mostly shot in West Germany and Berlin, including at the Spandau Studios. Some street scenes, particularly ones concerning the landmarks of Danzig, were shot on-location in Gdańsk, Poland. The Polish communist authorities gave the crew little time in the country, since the novel itself had been banned in Eastern Bloc countries. While filming in Poland, a production assistant was arrested by the authorities when trying to buy eels for a scene in the film from fishing boats, accused of attempting to sabotage the national industries. The scenes with the Polish Post Office were shot in Zagreb, Croatia, as were several generic street scenes. The scenes in France were shot on sets. Schlöndorff was advised by Grass during much of the film's pre-production and the writing of the script, and Grass is credited in the film for "editing and supplementing" the dialogue. David Bennent was discovered for the role of Oskar after Schlöndorff discussed with a doctor which illnesses might cause a child to stop growing at an early age, and the doctor brought up the case of the son of actor Heinz Bennent, surprising Schlöndorff, who knew and had worked with Heinz, but did not know about David's condition. During filming, there was a supposed love affair between Angela Winkler and Daniel Olbrychski, and a romantic rivalry between Fritz Hakl, who played Bebra, and the fiancé of Mariella Oliveri, who played Roswitha.

The Tin Drum was one of the most financially successful German films of the 1970s, taking in 25 million marks at the German box office. New World Pictures paid $400,000 for the U.S. rights, and the film became the highest-grossing German film in the United States, with a gross of $4 million, beating the record set a year earlier by Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film two stars out of four, writing: "I must confess that the symbolism of the drum failed to involve me." He continued:

And here we are at the central problem of the movie: Should I, as a member of the audience, decide to take the drum as, say, a child's toy protest against the marching cadences of the German armies? Or should I allow myself to be annoyed by the child's obnoxious habit of banging on it whenever something's not to his liking? Even if I buy the wretched drum as a Moral Symbol, I'm still stuck with the kid as a pious little bastard. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "a seriously responsible adaptation of a gargantuan novel, but it's an adaptation that has no real life of its own. There are a number of things seen or said on the screen that, I suspect, will not make much sense to anyone who isn't familiar with the novel ... However, because the story it tells is so outsized, bizarre, funny and eccentric, the movie compels attention." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film "will be hard to beat as the season's most prestigious bad idea for a movie," stating that Oskar "doesn't have a personality forceful enough to unify the rambling continuity or replace the narrative voice and complex of meanings that gave the book intellectual vitality and authority." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film a full four stars out of four and called it "quite shattering", with "one striking image after another." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times declared that it was "like few films since Citizen Kane—a combination of stunning logistics and technique and of humanistic content that is terrifically affecting." On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 84% of 25 critics' reviews of the film are positive, with an average rating of 7.5/10. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 63 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. In 2003, The New York Times placed the film on its Best 1000 Movies Ever list.

At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, the film shared the Palme d'Or with Apocalypse Now; The Tin Drum was the first film directed by a German to win the award. In 1980, the film became the first film either from Germany or in German to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.