Eric and Ralph talk about where they are now:
... [Eric] Goldberg clearly remembers his emotions when he was invited back into the Disney fold.
"It was relief and joy and . . . a little bit of fear. That's because, to a certain extent, when we embarked on this movie, it was one of those things where we were asking, 'Is this going to be the first one or the last one?' It felt like, 'We'd better make this one good, because it's going to be our last chance.' "...
Eric is one the big talents in animation, also a very nice guy. Before coming to Disney in the Katzenberg era, he animated for Richard Williams and ran his own studio in Great Britain. He was the animation director for Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and though the feature film didn't fly, the animation was top notch.
And then there is the estimable Mr. Bakshi:
Q: Do you ever look at your old stuff?
A: No, not at all. I hate it. I don't know why. If I look at it, it might not be as good as people say it is. I had so little to make it. Making it was so fraught with battles with studios and critics and censors. They were very painful films. I look at the money Pixar has. They do beautiful films. The first three minutes of any film they make they spend more money than I did in any one of my films. So it was very difficult for us to produce that work. And all the guys that drew who were my friends are dead. It's a hard pill ...
I got to know Ralph a bit during the making of his hybrid feature Cool World, financed and released by Paramount in those off days when Brad Pitt was young and dewy fresh ... and not commanding a gazillion dollars a picture.
But those were exciting and wild times. The animation industry was springing back from its late 1980s depression, and Paramount was trying to keep the animation crew non-union, even as it approved all of Bakshi's over-scale cartoonist hires. (Ralph was offering his animators and assistants more than they could get anywhere else, so kudos to him. But Paramount had no idea they were paying top dollar. They were pig ignorant about salaries back then.)
Mr. Bakshi, one of a kind. Both then and now.
Ralph on the left; animator Steve Gordon on the right.
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And one of a kind illustrator Barry Jackson at center left.
So is Princess and the Frog successful or not? It hasn't even broken 100 million domestic after 6 weeks. Seems pretty lame to me...
Sounds like you answered your own question.
The one interesting fact is Diz is acting like it's a hit...do they think they're fooling anyone or just covering up for a lot of bad decision making?
Disney is acting like its a hit? You clearly havent been to the meetings...
good...they've changed their tune. They WERE acting like it was a hit...
But will they try to blame Eisner, et al like they have everytime in the past when a film flopped...
Yeah, suddenly JL's batting record isn't looking so good in So Cal, is it?
I think the only time anyone was acting like PATF was a "hit" was on the opening weekend when it did open at the top of the box-office , so they could crow a bit about having "the #1 movie for the weekend!" ... but even that crowing wasn't too loud because that Dec. 11 opening weekend was a very slow movie weekend overall , so the cumulative opening weekend take was 'only' $24.2 million. (probably needed to make $35 - $40 million that first weekend to really break out the champagne at the hat building) . Even though The Princess and the Frog opened at the #1 spot , the opening box-office numbers didn't bode well.
I don't think anyone's been acting like it's a hit since then. I think the hope was that during the Christmas holidays family audiences might embrace the film in a big way , but that didn't really happen.
After the New Years' holiday it has made $86 million, so it's possible that it may just make it to $100 million domestic (or slightly better) before it closes. Then the focus is on the foreign box-office take .
Speculatively , let's say if it finally makes $100 million domestic then hopefully it does almost double the domestic box-office in the foreign markets , so something like $190 - $200 million foreign b.o. (this would be similar to how things went with "Bolt")
That would bring up the cumulative worldwide take for PATF to something between $290 - $300 million gross. Is that enough ?
I seem to remember that when "Bolt" was being derided as a flop Steve Hulett spent months assuring everyone that "Bolt" would eventually make it up to around $300 million (worldwide) and that figure would mean "Bolt" did not fail at the box-office.
"Bolt" is reported to have had a $150 million production budget ($45 million more than "The Princess and the Frog's reported budget). So what does PATF have to pull in worldwide to be considered not a box-office failure?
Again, comparing to how "Bolt" did at the box-office:
After 4 weeks in wide release "Bolt" had made $88.8 million. (domestic)
After 4 weeks in wide release "The Princess & the Frog" has made $86 million (domestic).
Not quite as good as "Bolt" numbers in a similar time frame, but not too much lower than "Bolt".
"Bolt" took 6 weeks of wide release to cross the $100 million mark. Then Bolt took another agonizingly slow 10 weeks to get to the final domestic number of $114,053,579 .
So, it is conceivable that if The Princess and the Frog is allowed to stay in the theaters for the same number of weeks they kept Bolt out there then PATF has a chance to do something over $100 million ($110 million ? $114 million ?) .
Disney (and Lasseter in particular) had something to prove with "Bolt" . They kept it in the theaters as long as possible even though it clearly wasn't doing that well. I think they have more to prove with "The Princess and the Frog" . It will be interesting to see if they extend the same grace period to "The Princess and the Frog" to allow PATF's domestic b.o. total to get as high as possible before closing out it's theatrical run.
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