Beware the Glut!!

Let's note it yet again: The media is picking up the mantra: "Too many animated features! Catastrophe ahead!" They point with trembling hand to what happened in the early nineties: "See, Disney had all these big hits. And then these OTHER studios jumped in, and had FLOPS. And then, Disney started having flops!" Well, ah, no. See, the way it works, you make good movies with interesting characters and compelling stories ("Little Mermaid," "Lion King," etc., etc.) and people turn out to see them. You make less compelling films with, say, lacklustere stories and/or the same types of characters and/or repetitive Broadway show tunes that audiences have seen a half dozen times before, and whattayanknow, they don't come out. When I taught school, there was an old axium: No matter how wondrous your lesson plan, no matter how energetically you deliver it to your eager young minds, eventually they get tired of it if the plan doesn't CHANGE. Same thing with movies. There are only so many action pictures, horror pictures or animated features people will plunk down money to see if they're the same old bells and whistles in barely different packaging. I mean, no media outlet says: "Boy, the public is sure getting tired of live action films." They don't say it because it's a ludicrous statement. Audiences get bored with the tired and uninteresting, no matter what kind of film it is. There's a reason the Pixar films, some of the DreamWorks features, and the Disney films from the early and mid-nineties smashed box office records: they had qualities that the public sparked to. There's a reason why "Valiant" and "Atlantis" didn't improve Disney's balance sheet. They weren't very good films. You can pretty much ignore conventional wisdom regarding what audiences want to see. It's generally wrong. Seventy years ago, conventional wisdom said that pirate movies didn't perform, then "Treasure Island," "Captain Blood" and "Mutiny On the Bounty," turned that idea on its head. (More recently, Geena Davis's mega-flop "Cutthroat Island" provoked the same C.W. Then "Pirate of the Caribbean" came along.) Civil War pictures were poison at the box office, then "Gone WIth the Wind" hit big. And of course, "Snow White" was going to sink Disney. So you can, I think, pretty much ignore media bleatings of oncoming disaster now. Our prediction: If an animated feature is produced that people want to SEE, audiences will flock to it. Whether it appears in the middle of a "glut" or not.