posted 03-15-2011 05:23 PM                    

but Randy and Mike, 'The Lion King' was a blatant rip off of 'Kimba the White Lion' - no originality there

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Josh Lasher:
It's based on the popular children's book of the same name by cartoonist Berkeley Breathed ("Bloom County").

The problem is the book takes maybe 10 minutes to read, if you're in kindergarten and you read 30 words per minute, and the same thing almost always happens when such a book is padded to make a 90 minute movie...

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posted 03-15-2011 05:26 PM                       

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Many Culprits in Fall of a Family Film
By BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — In the movie business, sometimes a flop is just a flop. Then there are misses so disastrous that they send signals to broad swaths of Hollywood. “Mars Needs Moms” is shaping up as the second type.

Walt Disney Studios spent an estimated $175 million to make and market “Mars Needs Moms,” which sold $6.9 million in tickets at North American theaters in its opening weekend. That grim result puts the 3-D animated adventure on track to become one of the biggest box-office bombs in movie history, on par with such washouts as “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” “Cutthroat Island” and “The Alamo.”

“Scary” is how Chuck Viane, president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios, described the audience rejection of the film. “Was it the idea? The execution? The timing? There are a lot of excuses being floated.”

The financial impact on Disney’s studio will be severe. The company has already taken a write-down of about $100 million related to the film and the closing of ImageMovers Digital, a motion-capture animation division run by Robert Zemeckis, who helped produce “Mars Needs Moms.”

Tens of millions more in losses are expected, pending worldwide box-office results. The film opened in 14 overseas territories, representing 25 percent of the international market, and attracted $2.1 million.

Mr. Zemeckis, whose directing credits include seminal hits like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump,” was unavailable to comment on Monday, a spokeswoman said.

“Mars Needs Moms” also signals broader movie business problems. Computer animation has been Hollywood’s most reliable moneymaker over the last decade — so much so that nearly every studio, including Universal Pictures and Paramount Pictures, has ramped up production of such films. As the first big-budget computer animated movie to flop, “Mars Needs Moms” tells some film executives that the market is becoming saturated.

“Mars Needs Moms,” about a 9-year-old boy whose mother is abducted by Martians, followed quickly on the heels of “Gnomeo & Juliet” and “Rango.” “Hop” will arrive on April 1; “Rio” arrives two weeks later. Close behind are “Kung Fu Panda 2” and “Cars 2.”

“There’s only so much room in the market for family films,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com.

Movie executives also suggest that “Mars Needs Moms” can be seen as a consumer referendum on 3-D ticket pricing for children. While child tickets to traditional screenings run about $8.75 in large cities like New York and Los Angeles, child admission for 3-D screenings is $13. Imax charges $15.50 for children. Box-office analysts have been increasingly concerned that consumers in general and parents in particular are starting to rebel. “We believe exhibitors’ core strategy of raising ticket prices through 3-D premiums” is a “dangerous strategy,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote last Tuesday.

It is quite rare for a Disney release to flop as badly as “Mars Needs Moms,” which is based on an illustrated book by Berkeley Breathed, best known for the comic strip “Bloom County.” Part of the problem may have been the story. What child wants to see a movie about his mom being taken away from him? But studio executives also pointed to the style of animation as a culprit.

“Mars Needs Moms” may lead to the end for the Zemeckis style of motion-capture filmmaking, which has proven increasingly unpopular with audiences. Unlike the digital animation used by Pixar, in which movies are created entirely by computer, the Zemeckis technique requires actors to perform on bare sets while wearing uniforms outfitted with sensors to record their movements. Those movements are then transferred into a digital model that computer animators use to create a movie.

Critics and audiences alike, with audiences voicing their opinions on Twitter, blogs and other social media, complained that the Zemeckis technique can result in character facial expressions that look unnatural. Another common criticism is that Mr. Zemeckis focuses so much on technological wizardry that he neglects storytelling.

Despite his pioneering work with the technology, Mr. Zemeckis was leapfrogged by James Cameron and his megahit “Avatar.” Mr. Zemeckis’s previous motion-capture film, “A Christmas Carol,” released in December 2009, was a commercial disappointment and contributed to the ouster of Dick Cook, the Disney executive responsible for putting “Mars Needs Moms” into production and bringing Mr. Zemeckis into the Disney tent.

Disney closed ImageMovers Digital last March after Mr. Cook’s successor, Rich Ross, viewed footage of “Mars Needs Moms.” About two months ago, Disney quietly pulled the plug on what was to be Mr. Zemeckis’s next directing project there: : “Yellow Submarine,” a 3-D adaptation of the 1968 Beatles cartoon.

The company decided to proceed with “Mars Needs Moms” in part because it had already spent so much on it and in part because some executives, notably ones left from the Cook era, acted as cheerleaders for the project.

The next big test for motion-capture filmmaking will come in December, when Steven Spielberg uses the technology in his big-budget “Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.” Meanwhile, Mr. Cameron is working on two “Avatar” sequels.

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quote: Randy Stankey

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even the title is going to be a turn-off.

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posted 03-15-2011 06:27 PM                    

quote: Mike Blakesley

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Why would you say that?

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posted 03-15-2011 07:29 PM                       

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Can The NYT Be Trusted To Cover The Film Business?
By David Poland - Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Sorry, but the Brooks Barnes story on Zemeckis has a lot of facts and quotes that are fine… but they are put together in an intellectually dyslexic way that is actually a bit dangerous. Right or not, the New York Times is still The Paper of Record. But in this piece, as with many others, Brooks Barnes takes liberties with the forest while getting the trees he can figure out portrayed accurately.

Surprisingly, this piece is the NYT As Blog to the Nth degree. it allows, for instance, Roger Ebert, to crow about it, only really considering one context, because the piece takes a crap on 3D and that’s Roger’s favorite whipping format these days. (This is, of course, a little odd, as Roger is one of the great champions of variations of format. But the business side of 3D seems to have raised his pique lately.) Or it allows guys like Rich Greenfield, who overstates for quotes all the time, to get at a true idea but to misplace blame in stunning fashion with, “‘We believe exhibitors’ core strategy of raising ticket prices through 3-D premiums’ is a ‘dangerous strategy.’” (Note: the quote was cobbled together by the NYT.) In fact, exhibitors are not in any way responsible for the rise of 3D. It’s a studio strategy. 100%. Or perhaps Mr. Barnes doesn’t know the difference between exhibitors and distributors.

There are a whole parade of wildly overstated ideas here… and again, the blogginess is that Barnes states completely unproven, unprovable ideas as fact.

““Mars Needs Moms” also signals broader movie business problems.”

Uh, no. It’s one movie. It is a platform from which people who believe that animation is getting oversaturated can repeat their case. But it clearly proves nothing, aside from the failure of one movie to open.

But the facts are much more complicated. Rango opened well, but not sensationally, one week earlier. But great word-of-mouth and the phenomenon of parents waiting for word-of-mouth to decide whether a film is safe for their under-10s made Rango a strong 2nd weekend choice for Mom’s core audience. Combine that with weak reviews and a campaign that obviously got no one excited and two animated films in two consecutive weekends and you are a lot closer to an answer than “the sky is falling on animation, motion-capture, and 3D.”

““Mars Needs Moms” may lead to the end for the Zemeckis style of motion-capture filmmaking, which has proven increasingly unpopular with audiences.”

Again, incredibly irresponsible, lazy writing. “The Zemeckis Style” is not just motion capture, but specific to Bob Zemeckis as a director or a producer. This is his fifth motion capture film and the second one he didn’t direct. The three he did direct did, in succession, $290m, $200m, and $325m each worldwide. I’m not sure how this qualifies as proving “increasingly unpopular.” However, the films have each been quite expensive, which is the issue for Warner Bros, Paramount, and Disney.

The first Zemeckis-produced mo-cap was Monster House, which did $140m worldwide. Not a home run. But not a flop either… especially coming out of Sony, where they have slowly been growing their animation business. And now this clear flop.

“Mr. Zemeckis’s previous motion-capture film, “A Christmas Carol,” released in December 2009, was a commercial disappointment and contributed to the ouster of Dick Cook…”

Oh, bullshit. Iger went in a completely different direction than was at the core of Dick’s philosophy. That is why the change, which filtered through every corridor of the company except Iger’s, took place. But more importantly… how eager does the NYT have to be to push an angle to twist the facts? Dick Cook was dumped two months before Zemeckis’ Christmas Carol opened. Did the Opening Box Office of Christmas Carol Past go back in time and kill Dick Cook?

After 13 paragraphs of speculative crap, Barnes finally mentions, quietly, Avatar… the 3D motion-capture film that grossed $2.7 BILLION last year. Then, horrifyingly, he connects Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, which was done on the WETA system by a different filmmaker than Zemeckis, with a very different visual palette than Zemeckis has chosen to work with on his five films, to this flop. If I was Spielberg, I’d be setting fire to some at the NYT.

This piece is so busy trying to sell its false premise, that this is an industry game-changer, when in fact it is a flop that will affect one filmmaker who has been doggedly sticking to his format and look, that he fails to deal with the reality of the tool of motion capture or to seriously address the animation glut, the vast majority of which is not mo-cap.

There are significant technological differences between WETA’s mo-cap system and the one ImageMovers has developed. But they are both just tools to be put in the hands of filmmakers. The resulting content is very much about the filmmaker and not the equipment. Tintin will not look like Avatar. However much of The Hobbit that Peter Jackson decides to use the technology for, will not look like either film.

For that matter, Monster House doesn’t really look like Zemeckis’ mo-cap directed films. Gil Kenan did a much more stylized version, not trying so hard to approximate reality and therefore, not suffering the “dead eye” issue.

And let’s not leave ILM out of this. When they did Davey Jones for the Pirates films, they ended up replacing Bill Nighy’s eyes with CG eyes… and it looked sensational and real. But the cost of doing that for every character for every minute of a film would be wildly prohibitive.

And I should also point out that Gnomeo and Juliet, in 3D and made outside of Disney, is by far the biggest off-brand success coming out of Disney so far… and that Tangled, in 3D, was easily the biggest Disney-brand animated hit since the heyday of Disney’s animation revival, 16 years ago. But why bother with little details like that when there is so much hyperbole available?

I know that some people won’t care at all about this badly conceived, written, and edited story being out there… but I do because these kinds of proclamations by the NYT seep into the cultural conversation as though they were accurate and insightful. This is not a philosophical disagreement between me and some writer. This story is deeply, lazily, enthusiastically misleading. The urge to write pieces announcing cultural change drives even the best papers to some terrible decisions. But does Bill Keller know enough about the movie business to be embarrassed by how wrong Barnes gets it, as Holson and Waxman did before him?

Is Mars Needs Moms a game changer? Only for Bob Zemeckis, who can go home, count his nine-figure fortune again, and decide what he feels like spending another studio’s money on next. I actually do feel bad for him.
He is one of the great underrated directors in history. And he’s invested years trying to make this technology sing. Audiences are okay with it… but not $700 million worldwide okay with it… and that is the kind of gross these films need. Unless he wants to fund himself, he’s going to have to move on now.

Right now, the mo-cap film system that has drawn this size audience is WETA’s… and only WETA’s. But mo-cap isn’t going anywhere. Disney hasn’t decided to kill off their 3D-on-every-animated-film plan. And animation will continue to be a massive crowd pleaser, if only because it is one of the few true 4-quadrant genres.

Getting it wrong is one thing. But the arrogance of getting it so lavishly wrong… it just makes me ache.

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posted 03-15-2011 07:48 PM                       

quote: Mike Blakesley

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Why would you say that?

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posted 03-15-2011 07:51 PM                    

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But the facts are much more complicated. Rango opened well, but not sensationally, one week earlier. But great word-of-mouth and the phenomenon of parents waiting for word-of-mouth to decide whether a film is safe for their under-10s made Rango a strong 2nd weekend choice for Mom’s core audience. Combine that with weak reviews and a campaign that obviously got no one excited and two animated films in two consecutive weekends and you are a lot closer to an answer than “the sky is falling on animation, motion-capture, and 3D.”

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posted 03-15-2011 08:03 PM                       

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But the business side of 3D seems to have raised his pique lately.

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Well, what's really bothered Ebert about 3D is the dimness and eye-strain.

These articles trying to come up with a Great Grand Theory of Movie Flopdom are just so much jerking off. Crappy movies become hits, good movies flop and vice versa. No one really knows why. If Mars Needs Mom was released in August maybe it would have done fine. It's not Heaven's Gate, or Apocalypse Now, it is not going to take down a studio, and certainly not going to alter the fate and future of motion pictures as we know them.

And sooner or later someone is going to hail it as a misunderstood classic

posted 03-21-2011 10:11 PM                       

quote: Martin McCaffery

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sooner or later someone is going to hail it as a misunderstood classic

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