The LA Times examines the Fox money machine:
"Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs," the third installment of 20th Century Fox's movie series about prehistoric animals, has become an international phenomenon, earning more than $600 million in overseas ticket sales and making it the most popular animated film ever abroad ...
40% of the box-office revenue has come from premium-priced theaters showing "Dawn of the Dinosaurs" in 3-D ...
... [T]he movie's family theme is playing particularly well in Latin America, and top local stars around the world hired to voice the characters tailored the jokes to their cultures ... In Germany, Sid the sloth is voiced by one of the country's most popular comedians, Otto Waalkes, who has been plugging the movie nonstop on talk shows and on stage during his own stand-up routines ... In Latin America, Fox released two versions, in Spanish and Portuguese, which were dubbed by popular telenovela actors and comedians ...
For Fox, the "Ice Age" movies have turned into a multibillion-dollar franchise ... With each of the two "Ice Age" sequels, the film series' overseas appeal has grown. International box-office sales accounted for 45% of the first movie's total ticket sales; the figure was 70% for the 2006 sequel and 75% for the current installment ...
What this kind of franchse building does is: 1) Keep the studio producing more features, and 2) Cause other corporate entities to jump into the Great Animation Race, in hopes of replicating News Corp's (or Pixar's, or DreamWorks's) money machines.
Animation, more than any other part of the movie business, is market-sensitive and market-driven. When cartoon features roll up huge grosses, the number of animated features increase geometrically. But when audiences stay away from ninety-minute cartoons in droves, animation production dives off a cliff. You have only to look at 'toons' history over the past ... oh ... twenty years to see how true this is.
When Disney had four animated blockbusters almost back-to-back (Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King) studios that had never done feature animation in their existence jumped in with both feet, and for the most part failed spectacularly.
They failed with hand-drawn animation (Quest for Camelot, Titan A.E., Cats Don't Dance ), but with c.g. animation, not so much. Today, thirteen years after Toy Story, Fox, Disney, DreamWorks and on occasion Warner Bros. (Happy Feet) have found big money with domestically-produced animation. Universal-G.E. is now going in a different direction with Chris Meladondri's Illumination Entertainment and its quixotic business model of farming out most of the work to someplace else as it charges into the animated feature wars. (Universal has made a lot of bad filmic bets lately. We'll see how this cartoon thing works out for them when Despicable Me is released next year.)
Fox, happily, has created its own private Fort Knox, and it's currently headquartered in Connecticut. I have little doubt that Blue Sky Animation will continue to prosper, and even less doubt that there will shortly be Ice Ages IV, V, and VI.
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Spammers are getting more creative these days.
I hope Blue Sky employees see some of that money.
Julie can go advertise elsewhere.
(Julie being the top post I just deleted.)
Iron Giant was on the tail end of that mindless rush to do hand-drawn features. I'm glad they got that one off.
Osmosis Jones wasn't bad either (except the live action parts which were pretty awful)
Based on that article's analysis it looks like "talk" is the big selling point of the movies; the opportunity to dub the chatter with local celebrities.
I suppose this will mean even more talk in future installments.
I dunno. Even though Ice Age 3 is full of quite a bit of dumb chatter, the bulk of the entertainment comes from it's word-less physical humor and action sequences. And thinking back, there was a TON of action sequences.
Could just be that physical action comedy, the lifeblood that once defined animation, travels well and makes money. Or it could be a zeitgeist moment. Experts with MBAs will be scratching their heads over this phenomenon for years. In the short term, lots of Ice Age 3 knock-offs are sure to be greenlit, hoping lightning will strike repeatedly, just like what went down in the immediate wake of "The Lion King" with 2D.
Ice Age 2 had a nearly identical box office, so i doubt its totally random it was successful.
Well, maybe the success of the entire trilogy is random, but Im pretty sure the makers of the Ice Age series knew IA3 would make bank.
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