This isn't startling to anybody who's been paying attention:
Disney is wringing the pink out of its princess movies.
After the less-than-fairy-tale results for its most recent animated release, "The Princess and the Frog," executives at the Burbank studio believe they know why the acclaimed movie came up short at the box office.
Brace yourself: Boys didn't want to see a movie with "princess" in the title ....
I got news for the big corporate thinkers. "Princess" on the movie posters isn't the reason the feature underperformed ...
Boys had no problem going to see Little Mermaid. And they didn't have any reluctance watching Princess Jasmine fall in love with Aladdin.
Consider another Disney hand-drawn feature: You can't get much more virile and manly than a cartoon entitled Hercules, can you? Yet the muscled Greek God performed at about the same level domestically as TP&TF ($100 million) when it came out a dozen years ago.
I would submit that both pictures had great stuff in them; both contained fine animation, zesty settings, solid voice acting and music. But based on box office, neither connected with the public the way Mermaid or Aladdin did, because the pieces didn't jell in the same way the Disney animated features came together in the first half of the nineties.
Face it, the want-to-go factor is still what it was in Samuel Goldwyn's day:
"When people don't want to come and see your movie, you can't stop them."
Anybody seriously think Princess in the title was the deal breaker? Puh-leazze. The only reason the execs cling to that as an excuse is it's an easy alibi, but Hollywood is always great with explanations that absolve it from responsiblity:
"Nobody wants to see Civil War pictures." [Gone With the Wind]
"Westerns are box office poison." [Dances With Wolves]
"Who the hell want to see an earthling fall in love with a blue alien Princess that's nine feet tall?" [Guess which movie ...]
The point is, it's the connectivity of the movie with the movie-going public that largely determines box office winners and box office losers. Titles have little to do with it.
But they're sure a convenient crutch, aren't they?
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Judging from the fact that it's cleaning up overseas in Feb.-Spring, it's looking more like Christmas was the Deal-Breaker...
With PRE-Christmas (with the kids still in school) as the Deal-Crusher, and Avatar, of course, as the Deal-Stomper.
(Early December is usually reserved for the adult and teen titles, since adults and teens don't have to worry about Mommy finding holiday-shopping time to drive them to the theater.)
And as others have pointed out in other threads, it was a -pleasant- movie, but it would take two or three of them to Singlehandedly Bring Back The Genre Overnight, if that's what the studio was genuinely expecting.
That's what's acquired with a little bit of old-fashioned practice, and it's only reasonable to assume they'd need a little after five years out of training.
That's one of the other two phony reasons for PatF not doing well: "It was released in the wrong spot and other films took its BO away" (though there are multiple films that prove this wrong) and the "It was badly marketed!" (I'm sure that will be the next exclamation from the next poster.)
The most likely reason? It was the wrong film at the wrong time and the audience wasn't interested in it enough to go see it. It wasn't even because it wasn't a good film (though that seems to be clear overall) since that would only account for the second weekend's take (and after), but since the first weekend sucked the only conclusion is Lasseter greenlit the wrong film.
My advice to Disney: STOP WITH THE GD FAIRYTALES!!! Dreamworks (Shrek) and even Disney (Enchanted) have made them irrelevant.
"It was the wrong film at the wrong time and the audience wasn't interested in it enough to go see it."
Agreed. But that doesnt mean they should stop with the fairy tales. In fact, one could argue that PATF wasnt even a proper fairy tale...
I think its a matter of whether or not the story is good. As always...
For the record though, Rapunzel going up against Harry Potter AND Dreamworks MegaMind is a recipe for disaster.
Well, Harry Potter, anyway. (I seem to remember one other Disney movie that went directly up against Harry Potter and didn't fare so well...)
To give you an idea of how things have changed: Ten years ago, Disney put "Emperor's New Groove" into a Christmas Day opening because they wanted to BURY it. You see, back then, nobody talked about going shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, so Thankgiving and December were valuable opening weeks, and Christmas Day was the week your movie would be "invisible" because all the critics were on vacation.
As we can see with Alvin and Sherlock fighting over the Christmas opening slot, it's, um, slightly different today.
all I know is I loved Hercules. (Who put the glad in Gladiator? HER-CU-LEEEEZ!)
from my humble standpoint as both consumer, girl, and artist, I didn't see any intriguing marketing for Princess, and what I did see look awful (gross rotting teeth farting swamp bugs? no thanks)
A vet Disney story artist has told me he thought "The Princess and the Frog" was not as good as it needed to be.
He thought it depended too much on old-style gags and some of the characters were over-animated.
One opinion. I liked it better than he did.
From my humble standpoint, it might have something to do with Ron and John's style no longer connecting to today's audiences... It's admirable that Disney wanted to rehire some of the animators responsible for that second golden age, but some of those scenes and jokes might have worked better in the 90s.
People deride Dreamworks for their penchant to put current gags in their movies (e.g. the infamous Pixar vs Dreamworks cartoon that made the rounds on the web, where Dreamworks' had that one expression), but you have to admit that these connect better with today's audiences.
Thanks to Floyd for his comments in the article. I whole-heartedly agree
Jee-zus. If Disney's so worried about demographics, if it's worried about princess movies not appealing to boys, it ought to be *really* worried about its muppet movie. Who's THAT going to appeal to, three-year-olds?
Yeah, we now know that "girl" titled fairy tale movies don't do well with today's audiences.
After all, just look how "Alice in Wonderland" bombed ... oh, wait ...
That girl Alice raked in $116,101,023 opening weekend.
Johnny Depp is the ONLY reason Alice is a hit. That's what got people into theaters. That and it looks like a head trip. A drug experience with Johnny-that's the draw.
That, and that there are people (especially on college Spring Break) who will worship Tim Burton for ANYTHING...Usually for reasons at least ten years out of date.
And judging by the fact that there are still mindlessly slavering Tim fans who will defend Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, I don't know exactly when Tim's contract with Satan expires, but could it please expire soon?
How much BAD press and BAD fan reaction is it going to take for the leadership at Disney to GET OVER their inflated egos and CHANGE IT BACK?
What possessed someone to title a film with what will be used as a metaphor to describe the last 10 years at Disney Animation: "Tangled".
Duh.
(and of course none of these teen boys that they are supposedly going after by changing the name from Rapunzel to Tangled will have actually read about this brilliant scheme on the internets -- "No one will every know !" -- so they'll be tricked into lining up at the box-office to see the same Disney princess film which was Rapunzel. BUT if it's called Tangled that means the boy audience will embrace it ? Right. And tell me again, why do these geniuses get paid more than the rest of us ?)
I've said this on other blogs and I'll say it again here. When Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid,and Hercules were released there was no such thing as the Disney Princess line. Princesses were not marketed to such a high degree than they are today. Whether you believe it or not I have several friends with both boy and girl children. Their mothers took the girls to see the movie (and loved it) and the boys did not go to see it.
The CinemaScore for the movie is a solid "A" which means that the people who saw the movie loved it. Unfortunately most of the people who saw the trailer and marketing material had a preconceived notion of what the movie would be based on similar movies released recently.
I do not believe that the film itself is good enough to be a blockbuster, but I think a domestic gross of $150 would not be unreasonable to expect if Disney had chosen a different marketing tactic.
The basis of the belief that PatF suffered in the box office due to its name is not just some executives looking for excuses. Disney hired a market research firm to figure out why people did or did not go see the movie and the results say that boys (and adults without children) did not want to see a Princess film.
This is based on hard data and facts, not just wild speculation.
I wonder what the data will say about the Winnie the Pooh movie? "Apparently boys and girls over age 7 and adults without children had absolutely no interest in seeing a Winnie the Pooh movie"...well..yeah
Except that Disney already knows that about Winnie the Pooh. That's why it is being made for 1/3 the cost of The Princess and the Frog. The bar is being set much lower for Winnie the Pooh because the target audience is much narrower.
The sole goal for making Winnie the Pooh is to try to widen the Winnie the Pooh market which has slowly grown younger and younger over the years.
In that case, call it "Stuffed".
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