It's hard to make anything at the box office when it was barely released to theaters[1]. Wikipedia says it ended up in three US theaters, some theaters in the UK and 12 overseas markets without Disney+. Otherwise, direct to streaming and discs.
[1] https://deadline.com/2022/01/turning-red-skips-theaters-disn...
You can drop it from the data set and it doesn't change the argument, though. Disney's been dropping some impressive flops lately.
Disney will probably never want to share the truth about which of their films were business flops or not.
After the MCU reset, I don't think Disney has any idea what to do.
They could probably use ChatGPT to make better scripts tho
kids _love_ violence. The story is simple (Disney TM).
I can't speak for all kids, but for mine it's the opposite—the main TV remote they use controls our Fire TV Stick, and has a button for Disney+ built in. Plus, our iPads have Disney+ apps. Whereas our optical drive is a PS4, so they'd need to use the TV remote to switch to a different input, plus the PS4 controller. I'm not saying they couldn't figure it out if they wanted to, but for them, navigating menus to Disney+ is much easier.
Favorites in our place with the kids are Cars and Planes (though more Cars lately). We're on an old musicals kick lately, and it's just fun watching some of the big budget musicals from the 60s - when they wanted to get a whole street of people dancing, they went out and got a bunch of people trained to dance in the street. They also were a good bit longer, and generally had more room to breathe. The story didn't feel rushed at the end like a lot of the more modern one do (Encanto is a particular offender here, as far as I'm concerned).
Oh, for that you have to go back to the 1930s and Busby Berkeley. "Footlight Parade" is probably the best of that genre. At least see "Shanghai Lil".
Turning Red is equally great - as someone who has also grown up in the 90s the film just gets so much right, it's a delight to watch. The story turns into absolute nonsense by the end but meh, the joy of watching teenagers figure out how to get money for a concert they want to go to is worth it.
Are you streaming these? what service have they landed on? I haven't been able to find them on the services I have accounts with.
We keep a DVD-based Netflix account around for a lot of this stuff, and I've purchased quite a bit of physical media on eBay or at local thrift stores over the years. It's rare to pay more than $5 or $6 for a good DVD of stuff we're looking for, and then into Plex it goes. Most of it can ship Media Mail if I'm not in a hurry.
As far as I'm concerned, streaming services are good for "I want to watch something; I don't care what." They tend largely trash for "I want to watch this specific thing."
Anymore, we'll just wait for them to hit streaming. As GP mentioned, the latest movies just haven't seemed very good. Not up to par with the likes of Moana and Frozen, at least.
Having grown up with Tail Spin also very much helps the staying power of anything Baloo.
Ratatouille was a Pixar movie. "Pixar was responsible for creation and production, while Disney handled marketing and distribution." Ratatouille was released after the merger was complete but I'd imagine the story was largely locked in.
I guess, one of the last movies to have Pixar DNA through and through.
But I think some wonderful movies have been made in the last ten years, most notably Encanto and Turning Red. They're both massive successes, and I think they are in many ways better than those movies I grew up with.
Not to mention Frozen, Moana, Inside Out, etc. These are all wonderful movies.
(Ratatouille is also great, btw, don't get me wrong!)
You would choose a cartoon over your kids?
:)
I mean, obviously your opinion is incorrect, but that might be why. On the plus side, at least you didn't have to correct me about Disney not being the company to develop the show, as if I thought Disney had a secret Australian animation division. So you have that going for you.
That said, I tend to agree that both Animation and Pixar are floundering a little bit and it’s a problem. Marvel could be healthier too and certainly Star Wars isn’t doing what Iger wanted. However, I am more inclined to point at Chapek’s reorg as the cause: you’re going to affect creative satisfaction when you remove the ability to control your movie’s creative destiny.
Iger is working to fix this and that’s a good thing.
China is a closed society with a highly advanced civilization and a technology level that surpasses the rest of the world. The country is ruled by tribal chieftains who use swords, spears, and what not to fight for the title of supreme leader. All Chinese people are passionate about foot-binding. The chieftains living in the palace are extravagantly rich and the level of medical technology is almost miraculous. The magnetic levitation trains are like magic. IN the same time, ordinary Chinese people live in huts and spend their days feeding rhinoceroses (or, to fit the local customs, pandas) since there are barely any roads in the country.
If you were to show this movie in China and say that it praises the Chinese people and culture, I'd say you're insulting.
Same with Star Wars... They are killing their golden gooses
That last Star Wars movie was terrible.... I would rather watch 2 hours of nothing but Jarjar Binks than that movie...
How is this true of star wars?
Various sub-entities of the parent (Disney) charging each other service fees to jack up production costs and lower profit (and therefore tax obligations).
1. Budgets tend to not include marketing which are all over the place - big movies TEND to have a marketing budget of almost the same magnitude as the filming budget
2. But at the same time, movie theaters keep half of the box office gross.
So in the worst case, a movie needs to make FOUR times it's "budget" to be profitable.
But movies keep making money after the initial box office - either on home media, or streaming, though exactly how studios attribute individual streams to revenue from a monthly subscription is opaque and impossible to uncover.
By and large though, you're probably right - all 3 of these are failures.
Also, movie theaters don't get half the box office gross. For big budget films, the distributor gets a declining share of ticket sales, starting with 90% for major films (Marvel, Fast and Furious, Mission Impossible, anything by James Cameron), and declining each week down to a low of about 10% after 2-3 months (depending on the specific contract between the distributor and the theater). This is a large part of why studios are now so focused on first-weekend gross: it's also their most profitable weekend.
Turning Red was surely a hit on Disney+. Hard to see from the consumer side what the impact was, but disney+ is a money machine and the can easily double the price.
I personally liked the story of Turning Red very much (though I'm biased to like it because it's set in Toronto), but more objectively, the film is a step above Strange World and Lightyear in terms of ratings.
Turning Red's ratings: 95% on the Tomatometer of Rotten Tomatoes (RT), 7.0/10 on IMDb, and 3.7/5 on Letterboxd
Lightyear's ratings: 74% on RT, 6.1/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
Strange World's ratings: 72% on RT, 5.6/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
I don't know how it could've cost $175MM, but it's a quality movie and deserves kudos for giving us some diversity in protagonists.
The very same Disney Plus that lost 2.4M subscribers in Q1[0]?
That doesn't seem like "You could easily double the price" sort of performance. They still have plenty of subscribers, but they're not going "up and to the right" on the subscriber graph anymore.
It's hard to make the case that Disney is doing anything but "dropping flops on a public that doesn't want to see them."
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/08/disney-q1-2023-earnings/
I don't think that's a reasonable lens to be looking at how Disney's cartoon movies are doing.
I do think it might be worthwhile if you wanted to decide if Disney should have decided to keep the streaming rights, and whether the economics of that decision make sense.
...
"due to higher content and technology costs at Disney+ (with higher average costs per hour of programming, which included an increased mix of originals) as well as higher content costs and lower ad revenue at Hulu"
Not exactly the money machine I was envisioning!
For comparison, a recent movie that performed well at the box office was Top Gun Maverick.
$1500M box office on a $170M budget - that involved flying and filming an awful lot of hours in "rather expensive to run jets."
If they are going for a mainstream service, Netflix style, it won't be able to replace theaters.
Disney seems to want both, so they targeted their service at neither.
Maybe the authorities chase after some of the cases, but as far as I can tell the status quo remains sketchy AF.
As if CGI was cheap or easy to make.
And it has very few CGI shots compared to modern movies. It only had about 50 CGI shots in total.
In comparison, Everything Everywhere All at Once which had tons of practical effects and budget constraints had 500. A modern blockbuster movie pushes the number of CGI shots beyond 2000.
> We have entire movies made with humans basically just standing in front of green screen. You cannot seriously claim it has gotten harder or more expensive.
Again. For some reason unbeknownst to me you keep assuming that CGI is cheap and easy. Especially given the amount of CGI, resoultions and the details that have to be there.
I am not assuming its cheap and easy. I am assuming it is both cheaper and easier than it was and noticeably so.
All that said, I think we may be just approaching it differently. Let me share my thought process.
Cameron suggested the actual CGI scene count is 42[1] ( we can do 50 for easier math, but 42 will favor your position so lets assume 42 ). According to wiki[2] CGI budget was 15M-17M ( and lets assume 17M to account for the upper cost to accommodate your view of CGI cost ).
At $17M for 42 an instance of CGI comes to $404k a pop for T2. Unfortunately, this is misleading as it does not give us a good way to compare against Turning Red as its all CGI, so we need to compare in minutes ( tr is 1h40m or 100 minutes ). Without doing any real analysis, I have to rely on net again[1], where we learn that:
"all the work required to bring the T-1000 to life, costing $5.5 million, and taking eight months to produce, which ultimately amounted to 3.5 minutes of screen time. "
5.5M/3.5 = $1.571M per minute for Terminator 2 ( or about ~3M USD adjusted for inflation ).
In other words, adjusted for inflation re-running TR assuming the same cost as T2 results in 300M ( 100 minutes * 3M per minute ) projected CGI cost for TR ( almost double TR's budget, which we know was not all CGI ). In other words, CGI has gotten almost 100% more efficient, partially because I seriously doubt entire $175M TR budget went to CGI ).
I am not arguing its peanuts ( although I am sure argument could be made what with current AI tools ), but it is definitely more cheap.
To be fair, it might not be more easy ( that I have zero knowledge of ).
[1]https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdofree.com/terminato... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_effects_of_Terminator_...
Oh, it's definitely more involved. Because we went from rather low expectations like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq5ydeWWr4A to 4k highly detailed fluid animations where even individual hairs are simulated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNMeTMBWipE&list=PLgHd8hNRbl... :)
Or scenes like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhc3CinJHYY where you have multiple CG characters fully immersed into a scene with multiple human actors.
So it's more of "while it's definitely easier and cheaper to produce, the amount of work and detail that is now expected has gone up exponentially". I'm always reminded of this when I see VFX breakdowns for TV series like tis one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxTNhNe6Fbc
And I totally agree with your breakdown of costs :)
The fact that the entire narrative arc depends on it being a sequel makes it even more impressive.
Didn’t take my kids to see any of these, haven’t streamed them.
Before 2020 we probably saw every Disney and Pixar animation movie since 2012 with our kids. Some of them multiple times - Inside Out was genius, and I still hum Moana to myself.
We had zero interest in these movies from the trailers, and once we learned they would come with great big ice cream scoops of propaganda and eye-rolling allegory it was easy to say “no thanks” and keep our money.
I think you went into that movie with a preconceived notion, because that doesn't match up with the actual movie. For starters, there aren't any malicious characters, there's just well meaning family who sometimes make poor decisions. The closest thing to antagonistic relationships are between Mirabel and Isabella, and Mirabel and her grandmother.
That's propaganda now?
Damn, make sure no one stumbles into a propaganda production like Kill Bill, or such an obviously wake drivel like the original Alien.
>>while men either bumble or act maliciously throughout the movie
Felix is the embodiment of a strong masculine character - looking after his wife and child at every step, with all the typical traits you'd associate with men. And Mirabel's father(Augustin) is literally the only character willing to stand up to the grandmother and her abbhorent treatment of Mirabel. I don't know which version of encanto you've watched, but I don't recall a single male character acting maliciously throughout this entire film - it doesn't happen.
Encanto was just a really relatable story about a family.
Is that new for Disney? Or is it just you don't like the current flavor of propaganda and allegory?
What propaganda was there in those?
My former favorites as a kid were the Little Mermaid and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
Did I miss the agenda in those?
2.The need for self-control
3.The power of sacrifice
4.Don't judge a book by its cover
5.Love takes time and is built upon sacrifice and caring
https://www.ksl.com/article/29097698/5-moral-lessons-from-di...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-the-religious-right-attac...
(not to mention the general princess propaganda)
Up is clearly pushing narratives of scouting organizations, and the balloon agenda.
Not sure about Frozen (I managed to not see that one), but Cars is obviously glorifying internal combustion engines, and unsafe and unnecessary speed.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is clearly propaganda from ant and other insect activists.
An interesting place for movie reviews, regardless of your political or religious leanings, is the entertainment section at christiananswers.net. I'm an atheist but find it quite helpful.
In the reviews themselves they rate the movies both on moviemaking quality and moral quality, and cover both aspects in the review. They are quite willing to rate a movie 5 out of 5 on moviemaking quality and praise its story, acting, cinematography and so on, while at the same time rating it as extremely offensive and telling you in detail why seeing it might put your soul at risk.
There are comments there too which are almost never useful, but are often quite amusing. For example on one of the Harry Potter film reviews one of the commentators went on about how the film is actually promoting real witchcraft, and explained that before she became Christian she was a witch, performed real spells that worked, and the Harry Potter books and movies are an accurate portrayal of that real witchcraft and the spells that she use to use.
In the musical, they turn that scene into a giant naked dance line singing about hygge.
https://www.ksl.com/article/29097698/5-moral-lessons-from-di...
Disney didn't brag about the viewing numbers for either Strange World or Lightyear, so those films didn't appear to do well in theaters or streaming.
Disney, as a company, is in the middle of a mutation. The traditional block buster is dead, part of that is restructuring the company behind a new production and distribution process.
Disney just isn't making good movies anymore.
Disney just released Avatar Way of Water which made $2.3B at the global box office and became the third highest grossing movie of all time.
To be fair to the parent commenter, however, "Disney is making movies nobody wants to see," (the converse of the actual statement) seems like a less controversial statement which may be closer to their intended meaning.
[0] https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/franchise/Marvel-Cinemati...
I can't completely discount what you're saying, since I have no interest in Lightyear (the toy from Toy Story, but it's not a toy? Why?) or Strange World (it looks fine, but their ads didn't make very clear anything about it).
But I will say that Turning Red was wonderful, and my family has happily watched that a number of times. Not surprised it flopped in the theater, though, given I didn't even know it was in the theaters. As far as I'm concerned it went straight to Disney+, like Pixar's previous 3 movies. It's been one of my favorite things about the service.
Mandalorian is pretty good, Star wars: Andor was the best Star Wars I've seen in a while. I guess a lot of people missed out on Andor given that almost everything Star wars has been mostly crap.
I think part of the explanation for your list involves the fact that people don't like movies that much anymore.
As for Strange World, it was widely observed that Disney didn't give it any marketing push and a majority of people weren't even aware of its existence. To me, the main reason is that Disney doesn't bother to hype up movies that they don't really believe in. Strange World was one such film, a WDAS movie that isn't a fairytale or a musical (and isn't safe from the kind of conservative hate campaigns that Disney tends to avoid). Disney has a long history of letting their studios make films outside of the cookie cutter but release them with little fanfare. They can now easily be written off as Disney+ fodder.
Disney absolutely still relies on their animation studios for blockbusters, but they've noticed which formula works best for each. Pixar is never as successful as when it does sequels. WDAS routinely hits the 1 billion mark when it makes new additions to their fairytale canon, or bombastic musicals (see Encanto's massive success). It's no surprise then that they're now pushing WDAS, a notoriously sequel-averse studio, into making a third Frozen and a second Zootopia, and that a _fifth_ Toy Story is suddenly in the works at Pixar alongside... Inside Out 2. Any other project is bound to get buried in the release schedule or dumped on Disney+.
So what kind of movies are core to Disney's strategy? Star Wars is on a kind of hiatus and lives on Disney+. We have Marvel of course, which isn't in the healthiest state but still produces frequent hits. Avatar is now a big one. Any animated movie that fits their preferred formula. And of course, the depressing string of live-action remakes which, if they're all quickly forgotten, often hit the 1 billion mark, and I've no doubt that their lifeless Little Mermaid clone will do the same. I think Disney is now suffering from the same "we grew too big, too quick" realization as every other tech and entertainment giant, and they're definitely reeling from a few recent failures, but I wouldn't use Strange World or Turning Red as the poster children of their troubles; they never bet much on those anyway.
Unfortunately, when Disney makes the most bland and forgettable nostalgia bait, they still make the "movies people want to see".
(Apologies for the wall of text, I've had thoughts about the state of Disney for a while!)
Live action Aladdin was surprisingly good—it was best went they stepped away from the original animated movie, and switched to remaking Hitch.
If you were to show this movie in China and tell us that it praised the Chinese people and culture, I'd say you're being insulting
That suggests that people did in fact want to see it.
Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out, and Soul were all written and/or Directed by Pete Doctor.
Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and Wall-E were written and directed by Andrew Stanton.
There are multiple writing and directing credits on all of their films, but these two have writing and directing credits on almost all of the great original ones.
One thing I have noticed is some of the more recent Pixar movies don't feel like Pixar movies at all. They feel like Disney movies: Lot's of musical numbers, a lot more slap stick and silly, more cheap laughs. Have to wonder if Disney has been asserting too much influence on the company.
Which Pixar movies had lots of musical numbers? Of the ones I've seen (all but Lightyear) I only recall zero to three (depending on what counts as a musical number) that I'd count as having musical numbers. Have I forgotten some?
"Turning Red" had a some scenes where characters were singing, but they were singing for in-universe purposes. When I think of musicals what comes to mind is shows where the singing is not for an in-universe purpose.
Similar for "Soul" and "Coco". They had main characters that were struggling musicians and their music played a major part in their lives. All the music I recall in those was in that context (although it has been a long time since I've seen "Coco" so I could have forgotten music that was not in-universe.
Strange World [0] was a box office bomb - reported box office revenues of $74M on a budget of $135–180M.
It's got nothing on Turning Red [1], though. $20M on a $175M budget. Whoof.
Lightyear [2] only barely made their production costs, $225M on a $200M budget.
They've had some mild successes, but their last couple years of performance have been marked by some absolutely horrid bombs.
You can blame their "going broke" grade performance on whatever you want, but the reality seems to be that Disney is simply not making movies anyone wants to see. And if you're an entertainment company, well, that's a problem.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_World_(film)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Red
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_(film)