In search of James Mason and Pat Boone ...
And the b.o. is indisputably tangy this time of year.
Hellboy blasts through the #1 with a $13,770.000 tally, and we've got ourselves another strong comic book opening. (Hancockslides to a competitive #2.)
On the animated front, Wall-E drops to #4 -- behind Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D -- and now has $151 million in the piggy bank.
Kung Fu Panda, tearing up the box office over in the Middle Kingdom ($20 million to date), occupies the eighth slot stateside and is now just shy of $200 million.
Update: The weekend finals are in, and Hellboy takes the top spot (barely), with a $35.9 million, while Hancock finishes a close second with $33 million.
The Journey to the Center of the Earth, remake in three dimensions collected $20.5 million and the Show position, as Wall-E fell to fourth while picking up $18.5 million.
Down at the bottom of the Top Ten, #8 Kung Fu Panda has moved over the $200 million marker and now has a cumulative gross of $202 million. Indy and the Crystal Noggin now has $310.5 million.
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17 comments:
Run Po, RUN!! You chubby little Panda you.
Follow the link to find out how poorly the FX artists were treated after completing JttCotE.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=5262062&postcount=1
If HELLBOY was #1 at the B.O.
why did you post a pic from JOURNEY.
That's disrespectful.
Wall-e still hasn't broken even. I'm sure they're hoping on a huge foreign market box office.
Steve - do you know how Disney/Pixar execs are feeling about WALL-E's box office performance? Seems like it is performing below expectations; but it isn't exactly a huge flop like Speed Racer.
Well, on only the domestic box-office receipts Kung Fu Panda hasn't quite broken even yet either. So, yeah, the worldwide box-office numbers are really important.
Wall-E has not opened yet in most foreign markets.
By way of reference : Wall-E has been in domestic release for 3 weeks now --- When Kung Fu Panda had been out for 3 weeks it had made $155,830,875 in domestic box-office. Wall-E's take at the 3 week mark is $162,772,000 , so Wall-E is actually doing somewhat better at the box-office during the same time period than KFP did.
Does that bode well for the overall domestic b.o. and then the overseas b.o. for Wall-E ? I would hope so.
(of course Wall-E did cost more to begin with than KFP , so the little robot has a steeper hill to climb than the panda did . I think he'll make it.)
Yes it has. Kung Fu Panda Production budget = 130 mil. Domestic B.O. = 200 mil. I would call that broken even :P
I'm 100% confident Wall-e will make money...but its no smash hit, thats for sure.
On the subject of what it takes for these films just to break even, whatever happened to all the predictions that one of the major benefits of switching all animation production over to CG was going to be to bring the costs down ? $130 million for KFP , $180 million for Wall-E , those are insane numbers.
If the producers at Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks could manage to plan and control their budgets at Blue Sky's level ($85 million for Horton Hears a Who) those companies be a lot better off. Not as if $85 million is exactly chicken feed. I don't think it's only that the artists are paid less in White Plains, NY than in LA or Emeryville . (I hear tell that most artists working in Emeryville are not exactly making big bucks.) So where is all the money going in pictures like Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda ? It's not like Horton Hears a Who looked cheap. In terms of surface polish and production values Horton compares favorably with anything else out there. So how is Blue Sky able to hold down the budgets ? Towards the end of the last hand-drawn era the big animated features were costing between $70 million (Lilo & Stitch)and $80 million (Brother Bear) to $103 million (Home on the Range), with Treasure Planet in that same time period topping out at a gargantuan $140 million budget (of course, Treasure Planet has a large ratio of CG animation mixed into it).
So, why haven't the costs of making the movies come down or at least held steady by using CG ?
>> So, why haven't the costs of making the movies come down or at least held steady by using CG ? <<
Was wondering about that too.
Is it location? Dreamworks Animation and Pixar are in tax-heavy California, whereas Blue Sky is in Connecticut. I don't know what the taxes are there but I presume it's not as much as California's.
Next, i think Pixar and Dreamworks probably pay top dollar for their talent? Blue Sky's budgets will most likely go up every time they have a good success in order to stay competetive in keeping their talent, I think.
Other than that, I can't imagine what else it could be.
...That's disrespectful.
I guess I missed the memo saying that the #1 flick gets the blog-post photo, each and every time.
Thanks for giving me the heads up.
I finally saw Walle. First half was excellent. First 20 minutes beautiful. the rest not so great for me.
Lilo and Brother Bear were made at the Florida studio where the taxes and cost in general were far less than California. the current feature budgets can not sustain these levels of 180M before P&A.
Blue Sky is positioned best with doing these films below 100M for greater margin of return. But for how long?
"Yes it has. Kung Fu Panda Production budget = 130 mil. Domestic B.O. = 200 mil. I would call that broken even"
Ooops... I posted that wrong . What I MEANT to say was that within the first two or three weeks of release Kung Fu Panda had not yet broken even with only the domestic box-office take. I was trying to point out that Wall-E has only been out for 3 weeks and is actually doing better at the box-office than KFP had done during it's first three weeks , so it looks good for Wall-E in the long run (and Wall-E not released yet in most foreign markets)
Thanks for spotting that and the correction.
"Lilo and Brother Bear were made at the Florida studio where the taxes and cost in general were far less than California."
Hmmmm... so maybe permanently shutting down the Florida studio was short-sighted ? (of course that decision was made during the David Stainton regime, so not on the shoulders of the current management as such)
Then why aren't costs coming down with 3D now dominant? The technological advances were supposed to bring costs down.
On the 2D features it was insinuated that a large part of the problem was the fault of those darn greedy animators making too much money. The pay rate for top animation artists has come way down over the past 7 years from where it was for a brief period 1995 - 2001. If the animators are making less ,where does the money go in films budgeted at $100 million, $130 million, $180 million ?
Those budgets do seem unsustainable over a long run.
I think Blue Sky keeps their costs down by only having 300-350 or so employees in total. Plus they dont (yet) have a huge campus, just office space. But they are moving...
Blue Sky's budgets will most likely go up every time they have a good success in order to stay competetive in keeping their talent, I think.
No, it won't, as long as there is fresh talent willing to work for peanuts. Blue Sky runs pretty close to a sweat-shop model. They don't pay more for their talent as they continue to have success, because they're happy to flush that talent after every film. Anyone who gets a call to work on the next film, and who mentions a raise, doesn't come back.
Couple crap salaries with zero benefits, then keep everyone competing with each other for the best shots so they'll work unpaid OT and not complain, and you have a recipe for low production costs. It might not be sustainable, but that's how they're doing it.
the CG production process is expensive, VERY expensive. back in 1994 we were all told that CG will cut costs drastically because of the reuse of assets.
Hogwash. never gonna happen other than for T.V. shows. Also the fact of the matter is with the complexity ratings of this summers most expensive CG films you are dealing with BIG in house head counts regardless of the current wage scales its just shear quantity of talent needed over a several year period to pull of a big CG film.
it will be interesting to see what a new Blue Sky campus environment will do the film budgets.
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