Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Blue Sky Has Plans

While most eyes focus on Pixar, there's a studio on the right coast that keeps trucking:

Fox/Blue Sky Studios ... have greenlit the 3-D digital animated pic "Rio," which centers on a nerdy macaw who leaves the comforts of his cage in small-town Minnesota and heads to Rio de Janeiro.

Up is going to perform well through the month of June, probably very well. But then Blue Sky's new installment of its Ice Age franchise thunders into neighborhood multiplexes, and I expect that Up will, at that point, suffer a vertical drop.

Nothing to do with the quality of either picture, mind you, but it's good to face box office realities. Tent-pole type sequels have a lot of muscle with the ticket-buying public, and by July 1st the Pixar feature will have had a month working the turnstiles.

But what the hey. Both will do fine business. We'll see which animated extravaganza wins the summer cinema horse race soon enough.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its a huge summer for movies, between Up, Star Trek, Transformers, Ice Age, Harry Potter, Terminator, and some of the smaller ones, its going to be tough for any of them to be a runaway hit.

Its only one pie, no matter how you slice it up.

Personally, Im hoping for a huge Ice Age hit, but Im biased. Plus, it's easily the best of the 3. A really solid movie.

Anonymous said...

It's a sequel, animated AND 3D, of course it'll do exceptionally well.

Plus, it has Scrat AND dinosaurs.

Anonymous said...

No 3D film has yet to actually make money back without traditional projection--which still brings in over 80% of the income. Seeing as how theater owners have ceased investing in 3D/Digital projection over the last 6 months (and continuing into the forseen future), and seeing as how audiences are completely indifferent, I doubt "3D" will help much.

I love how most of the current reviews of "UP" mention how much they enjoyed the traditional projection more than the 3D.

Greg B said...

ROTFLMAO!!!!!!

Scrat is the best! I had some folks over who had never seen Ice Age, and you coulda heard the hootin' from a mile away!

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