Today was DWA day. A lot of departments have moved into the newly expanded Lakeside Building, and I tromped around the second and third floors, seeing who had settled where.
I find the additions to Lakeside quite nice, fancy even. There are wood floors and area carpets and lots of couches and soft lights. I'm surprised I never find people sprawled in one of them taking a nap; apparently everyone is focused and energetic.
Animators are hard at work on MegaMind ("The schedule is tight ..."), and a television special that I don't think has been announced yet so I will keep my yap shut about it. Kung Fu Deux launches shortly ...
An artist and I fell into conversation about How to Train Your Dragon's soft opening, about how it's held up with good word of mouth. He was as perplexed as I was that it didn't open better, saying it's one of the best features they've done. (The only thing I can attribute it to is early, unsteady marketing and that vikings are not ... ahm ... guaranteed audience grabbers.)
As mentioned below in comments, Jeffrey K. conferenced with the business press about the company's latest numbers:
DreamWorks Animation SKG reported a 65% drop in profit in the first quarter, a swing that was the result of not having a major holiday release to power sales at the beginning of the year. ... The Glendale animation studio reported net income of $21.7 million, or 24 cents per share, on revenue of $162.1 million for the three months ended March 31 ...
DreamWorks Animation Chief Jeffrey Katzenberg said, "2010 is off to a strong start, thanks in large part to the performance of ‘How to Train Your Dragon.' "
He called the studio's latest film the company's "next franchise" and announced plans to release a sequel in 2013 ...
DreamWorks Animation, I think, is well-positioned to make a nice chunk of money this fiscal year. HTTYD will top out somewhere between $400 and $500 million in worldwide grosses. And the last installment of Shrek will come in at $700 million-plus. (I won't venture a guess how well MegaMind ultimately performs.)
All in all, the crew should be enjoying free lunches well into 2011.
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23 comments:
If this doesn't make Dreamworks wake up and Realize they've got inferior marketing people running things, I dont know what will....
Wonder if Jeffrey still replies "Its out of my hands" to comments like this...
It's interesting how JK calls each release a "franchise". Gak.
At least the free lunches and stock options will be looking very nice in the future
It's amusing how some think DWA's sequels ("franchises") are bad ....
While Pixar's franchises (sequels) are good ...
The diehards die hard ...
It's funny, if Rapunzel (sorry, Tangled) opens to Dragons numbers, it will be considered a monster hit!
"It's funny, if Rapunzel (sorry, Tangled) opens to Dragons numbers, it will be considered a monster hit!"
That's absolutely true. It's all relative. Dragons is being compared to other DW movies. It opened softer than MvA despite releasing in the exact same spot with no competition and being a far better movie.
Tangled will be compared with other Disney Animation movies, none of which has opened higher than $43 million.
"It's amusing how some think DWA's sequels ("franchises") are bad while Pixar's franchises (sequels) are good"
Most of the comments I've read about Pixar's announced sequels on forums similar to this have been negative. They think Pixar is "selling out."
Pixar selling out?
If I recall correctly, didn't Steve Jobs sell the company to Disney? They're not selling out. They were sold.
Correct Floyd. Steve Jobs is billions richer for having sold out.
It's called capitalism. The true believers in true art will just have to resign themselves to the sad fact that perfection is a fleeting thing.
Hey, it seems like most of your posts have to do with Disney and DreamWorks Animation. Is it exclusive deals, or you go monthly to them instead of studios like Crest and Warner Bros. Animation, a studio you barely go to.
What's going on with Warners Animation? Anything new?
"It's called capitalism. The true believers in true art will just have to resign themselves to the sad fact that perfection is a fleeting thing."
Wow, Steve... I agree with you. Wait a minute... Ah Ha! You almost fooled me!
Who are you and what have you done with Hulett?!?
It's amusing how some think DWA's sequels ("franchises") are bad
While Pixar's franchises (sequels) are good ...
That's because Pixar doesn't want to make them--
They do, but when they do, they have other reasons for doing so besides the insecurity-complexes of "Will you consider us a real company now, if we do the Madagascar 'move-it, move-it' joke one more time?" ;)
"Correct Floyd. Steve Jobs is billions richer for having sold out."
In fact, in hindsight, Jobs selling out could not have been timed better. It was right before Cars which turned out to be Pixar's biggest flop at the box office. Pixar's worth as an asset was at an all time high which gave them pretty hefty negotiating power with Disney.
Let's imagine that Pixar had not sold to Disney shall we.
C7 would alive and well,currently pumping Toy Story 5, Monsters 2, Another Bug's Life, Cars 3, Nemo 2, Incredibles 3, and more.
Pixar would casting about for another distribution and merchandising partner, that's if they were still in business after the box office performance of Ratatouille.
Perhaps Dreamworks would have hit on something like Dragon much sooner to fill the void left by Pixar and be a different company today.
Perhaps Dreamworks would have hit on something like Dragon much sooner to fill the void left by Pixar and be a different company today.
No, George Bailey, DW would have only had Dragon to make them look good if someone (like Lasseter) had been around Disney to fire Sanders & DeBlois in the first place.
Which would never have happened during the Stainton administration, who would have kept "genius" Sanders around and freely indulged to do lord-knows-what...After American Dog, of course.
In said Watcher-verse, DW would be continuing to grind Shrek farther into the grave, as Katzenberg would have less access to info about which projects Pixar was working on, and having to dig deeper and deeper into their own house chests for a House Icon to exploit. :)
Let's imagine that Pixar had not sold to Disney shall we.
C7 would alive and well,currently pumping Toy Story 5, Monsters 2, Another Bug's Life, Cars 3, Nemo 2, Incredibles 3, and more.
(Alive and well AFTER their first flagship TS3 script bewildered the audience and did a major Dinosaur-bomb at the BO?
It's comforting to think that Eisner would have been kicked out for it anyway, in just about any alternate reality.)
Eisner should have been kicked out before he bought the Muppets. That new Muppet movie's a disaster waiting to happen. But hopefully that will only strengthen Pixar's position and it will be better able to fight Iger's insistence on more pointless sequels.
Kinda, sorta on-topic...
Jeffery Katzenberg on the Colbert Report, plugging the stereoscopic 3D format:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/281752/april-20-2010/jeffrey-katzenberg
"It was right before Cars which turned out to be Pixar's biggest flop at the box office."
Flop? Seriously? Cars made 460 million worldwide and was the 3rd highest grossing film of the year both domestically and worldwide. It is also Pixar's biggest merchandise creator, selling 10x more toys (etc) than Toy Story. The latter fact is the entire reason they chose to make a sequel(and all the shorts too). And Ratatouille made 620 million worldwide. Pixar was going to be fine by itself.
On the other hand, Disney animation had Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons (which made less worldwide than Cars did domestically). Disney needed Pixar far more than Pixar needed Disney. And if Pixar remained alone, then Lasseter and Catmull would have had their full focus on it instead of spread across all of Disney (but then we wouldn't have Bolt or Princess and the Frog).
The Pixar sale was to revive Disney, allow Jobs to focus on Apple and his health (flying to Emeryville once a week took its toll on the then-sick Jobs), and make lots of money all around. Any fantasies of Pixar failing if Disney didn't buy them are just that: fantasies.
Flying to Emeryville from where? Cupertino? Thats like a 30 minute drive.
"It was right before Cars which turned out to be Pixar's biggest flop at the box office."
Flop? Seriously? Cars made 460 million worldwide and was the 3rd highest grossing film of the year both domestically and worldwide
Another schoolyard Lasseter mud-flinger, but he's hoping to cash in on the prevailing belief at the time that Cars had "flopped" on its opening because it hadn't continued the upward trend and outgrossed Finding Nemo freakish numbers. (The same charge that was leveled at Incredibles.)
Media columnists at the time were so frustrated that Cars, like Dragon, hadn't turned out to be the flop their first columns proclaimed it to be, they tried spinning every story to make it look like Pixar had been "initiated" with its first flop, just for that long-awaited headline.
Nowadays, that's taken to be a sad myth we've since learned about opening weekend vs. imaginary projections vs. longrun legs (Dragon's opening, anyone?), but it's only the naysayers that are still trotting out last-year's songs from the Old Book and hoping that everyone will sing along
"Flying to Emeryville from where? Cupertino? Thats like a 30 minute drive. "
Which makes it sadder. But yes, he flew. He built a helipad on top of both Apple and Pixar for this very reason. Maybe not every time, but he did do it.
Although to be fair, a true "commute" from those two cities would be about 1:15 each with bridge/SF traffic.
"Flying to Emeryville from where? Cupertino? Thats like a 30 minute drive. "
I'd like to know what highway you're taking to make that time. Unless of course, you are commuting at 2am.
BTW, the rumor was that Jobs tried hard to get a helipad at the Pixar campus so he could just take a helicopter in. Emeryville and/or the FAA didn't go for it.
Why do all comments turn inevitably to Pixar?
Yes, in fact, Cars was Pixar's lowest grossing movie and would have been a disappointment to investors, which followed by Ratatouille would have crushed Pixar's stock price. If Pixar was sold anytime after it did, it would have been a much smaller number than the deal of the century made by Jobs.
Cars merchandising revenue was unforeseen and no doubt in part a driving force behind keeping the franchise alive. But Cars is also Lasseter's baby so it's doubtful he would let it disappear altogether. If anyone has ever seen the videos in which he gets all excited over his own toys you would know that he's his own toy's biggest fan.
So while Cars was not a flop compared to the rest of the industry, it certainly would have been considered a "flop" by investors and Disney (as it came under projections).
C7 wouldn't have cared if TS3 had been a flop anyway. It probably would have been direct to video where a large portion of the cash comes in to a studio anyway.
So while Cars was not a flop compared to the rest of the industry, it certainly would have been considered a "flop" by investors and Disney (as it came under projections).
But--since we're talking about Pixar now anyway--the issue at the time was that the "projections" were flat-out lunatic:
No one knows why Finding Nemo had done such runaway business in '03, but every Pixar film after that was expected to outdo its older brother--Nemo's business had been a historical perfect-storm happening right at a change in the industry, a drop of water in one of the worst movie summers of the decade, and revolutionized the audience for the first time to think that by supporting their Pixar habit, they were "rebelling" against the dreary live-action blockbuster system. (Think Dragon repeat-business vs. Titans.)
No Pixar followup could be expected to duplicate several conditions of history and create an even bigger full-blown audience mania out of thin air just for showing up...And yet Incredibles was dissected for its "disappointment" at the BO when it didn't cross the bar, and Cars, of course, somehow became a "surprise disaster". (At least, according to Jim Hill.)
Disney, who had learned a lesson about not confusing Liking the movie with Creating BO Figures, later learned to keep its big mouth shut about wishful-thinking box-office predictions, and shied away from making any commitments about Pirates2's opening a few months later. (Which fortunately didn't turn out to be a bad thing).
I agree with the above poster, but I'd like to add that not only was Finding Nemo a right-place-right-time movie, but it was also Pixar's funniest and widest appeal film.
(some people dont like robots, superheroes, cooking rats, or old man stories right out of the gate, but everyone likes cute talking fish)
Yes, in fact, Cars was Pixar's lowest grossing movie
True, if you don't count Toy Story and A Bugs Life. But then, these deep philosophical fanboy discussions don't need actual facts, do they?
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