From the Nikkster:
... [T]he movie that all of Hollywood is talking about tonight is Disney's Mars Needs Moms 3D. Why? Because the Dick Cook leftover is going to be one of the biggest money losers of all time. Costing $150M and, even with the higher 3D ticket prices, it'll be lucky to pull in $10M this weekend -- that's right all weekend. It's rare that any Disney 'toon flops at all, much less this badly. But my insiders say this movie is why, after Rich Ross screened it, Disney cut ties to Robert Zemeckis' Imagemovers Digital. ...
First point: I don't really consider Mars an "animated feature" in the way that we generally think of animated features. It's not animation but motion capture, rotoscope with a newer name.
Second point: I think mo cap is fine within the right environment. Certainly it worked like gangbusters in Avatar. And it's been kind of successful in other films. (We can't wave away Polar Express, a sizable commercial success after all the dollars were counted.) The problem is, I don't think the general public has ever embraced the technology. As much as I admired much about Zemeckis's Christmas Carol, I can understand why many were luke-warm to the feature. There was always that "I'm looking at dead people" aura about it.
But it's not Zemeckis or Disney for whom I feel badly. It's the (now former) IMD employees who poured their hearts and souls into this, even as they were being slipped the axe and IMD facility in northern California was closing.
There are more motion capture projects in the pipeline, Mr. Spielberg's Tin-Tin feature prominent among them. Later this year when the picture comes out, we'll see how Paramount does with it. I've got a queasy feeling about the movie, but maybe that's just me. This is Spielberg, right? How many flops does he have?
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26 comments:
Trolling coming in 3,2,1...
I'm here, what I miss?
The problem is with mocap is more than the "looking at dead people" thing, which is totally true. It's that it should be used in certain mediums. Mocap for video games and live action films are OK (I still prefer key framed animation overall). But it never works in full 3D animation. Because its not. The average audience member will never know the difference but they can feel that something is not right. With good key frame animation no questions it or have an uneasy feeling. Key framed animation with stylized characters normally always work. I know the never ending argument, Key Frame vs Mocap... I think that both can have their place and be around for ever. But mocap has no place in full animated films.
I'm not a big fan of motion capture - unless used in the right circumstance - but that's not why this film will flop.
It's because the trailers make the film look horrible. Whether it is or not is beside the point - the trailer is one of the worst I've seen in a long time. In fact anyone I've talked to about it has never mentioned the quality of animation they always say how stupid the idea and story look.
Why would they blame the whole studio when it's clear the director has no talent for directing (Time Machine anyone?)and the project should never have been greenlit and Zemekis has obviously lost what sanity he had years ago.
Wells and Zemekis will both get more work after this and probably continue to earn good money (even if JK just hires Wells back to twiddle his thumbs for a few more years), but the actual artists are blameless for this mess and yet they will be the ones to suffer
Hold on.......it's OBVIOUS that the real reason this movie has flopped is because it was made in C.G.
That's right C.G. that tired old burned out medium that isn't valid any more.
Let's all move on to the next biggest thing, and drop C.G. like a hot potato.
Yeah, not surprised this flopped. After Avatar, I don't think audiences can buy into Zemeckis' fake-looking zombie creations anymore.
I don't think Tintin will suffer from this. WETA is doing the motion-capture and Paramount is smart enough to open the film in Europe first (where Tintin is hugely popular), so to build the buzz and excitement for the North American release a couple of months later.
Who made the brilliant decision to make them look realistic and not keep my designs???
Cook, you're a moron.
We've never seen my designs come to life, moving before. Only the beautiful pages of my books and in the pages of newspapers with Bloom County and Opus. Have we seen photo realistic representations before? Those creepy dead eyes are all over the place? Not enough for former studio heads and hack directors.
Great decision Zemeckis. Perhaps, it's a good thing they shut down your company, since you've been making such bad decisions of late.
Go back to live action and leave animation to people that know what they're doing.
So remember this next time you adapt one of my books. Use my artistic style and designs. I mean, you wouldn't change the style of a Dr. Suess book to something else in a film would you?
Wait, scratch that.
Anon 1 and anon 2... thank you for my morning laugh. That cracked me up.
I don't think it was mo-cap that killed this movie. It was the character designs. They were GHASTLY. It's doubtful that CG or 2D animation would have made them any less appalling. They're even more awful-looking than Rango's - and bear in mind that, even if it's doing considerably better, that movie's not doing blockbuster business.
People can say snide things about Disney's signature "cuteness", but films with that quality have been hits and have stood the test of time.
Of course, contrarywise, CG can also kill GOOD character design and make it look revolting. Anyone here seen the latest Smurfs trailer?
I agree with anon 11:07:00--the trailers looked awful. Really, really awful.
Part of that, however, is explained by anon 7:33. I definitely do believe that character design is the first thing Joe Average American looks at when deciding whether to give an animated movie a chance or not. Ugly, unappealing character design is an immediate turn-off.
And this movie had some truly butt-ugly character design, all around. Especially that revolting fat character. No one wants to spend 90 minutes watching that guy. As shallow as that may be, that's just life.
Lastly, was that really Berkeley Breathed posting above?
To sum up--I think the failure of this movie is not so much the mocap (although it probably didn't really help either), but everything else. Bad design, a horrible trailer, and the suggestion from the trailer that the story goes nowhere.
Speaking of trailers, it's always nice when a really GOOD one comes out. Anyone seen the new trailer for Super 8? Now THAT is a friggin trailer!
Oddly enough Entertainment Weekly gave it a glowing review and couldn't say enough nice things about it. Though it's not fairing as well with other critics.
It looks better than that other kids cartoon rango.
What made anyone think this would make a good movie? It's a horrible book with amateurish illustrations by a so-so cartoonist who passed his prime 20 years ago. And a director who has yet to exhibit that he can tell a story or dircta a film.
We can debate the the causes all we want, but the clear pattern is that fully animated films are doing fantastic (even ones the animation community thinks have bad designs and bad marketing), and mo-cap movies are tending to be expensive disappointments.
There used to be two main justifications for mo-cap. One, it is supposed to be cheaper and faster, since skilled animators who can do realistic body mechanics are expensive and slow. Mo-cap technique is supposed to get you 90% of the way there before any animators are involved, and that gives naive producers a hard on. Two, it allows the use of skilled, known actors, who theoretically can give better performances than the typical animator. That gets live-action directors and marketing departments all hot and bothered.
On the first count, it's overwhelmingly clear that high-end mo-cap is more difficult and more expensive than just animating the damned characters from scratch. On the second count, it kind of worked with Gollum, but has been an epic failure most of the time. The performances in the best fully animated films have engaged audiences more effectively than have the vast majority of mo-cap performances.
There are segments of the games industry that have figured out how to effectively use mo-cap. In the feature animation world, it's a creepy dead end.
There used to be two main justifications for mo-cap. One, it is supposed to be cheaper and faster, since skilled animators who can do realistic body mechanics are expensive and slow.
Two, it allows the use of skilled, known actors, who theoretically can give better performances than the typical animator.
(Especially in Zemeckis's case, when he believes he can find the one right versatile actor to play every role in the story, and save on actors.)
And third, it allows directors like the Forrest Gump and Pirates of the Caribbean directors, who'd never dabbled in animation in their life but had fun watching the VFX guys push their shiny buttons, to pretend to play in the same sandbox as that one Pixar movie they liked.
That's been the one problem so far, a glut of non-talent in love with the medium without quite understanding the message, ending up at a loss, and learning no lesson about why the audience stayed away.
(To be fair, "Mars" had Simon Wells, who unlike most of Z's films, DID understand animated features, if "We're Back" and "American Tail II" count.)
having worked with simon wells before I am trying to understand how he did not see this film as a train wreck from the get go.
he should go back to storyboarding.
Have you ever seen Time MAchine directed by Wells? Hopefully this film isn't as bad as that train wreck
I din't think Wells knows what a train wreck is, otherwise he wouldn't have ever "directed," and will refrain from attempting so again. At least the character designs weren't as awful as the juvenile crap chuck zimbellas churns out.
The failure of the films doesn't have anything to do with the technique of how the film was produced as was mentioned the success of Avatar, the Pixar films and you could even add the Pirates of the Caribbean films and a lot of others debunk the idea that CG as a character/storytelling medium is bankrupt. The failures squarely rest on the fact the Zemeckis has strange ideas about the kinds of things that should be communicated in films that came across in these animated films and they made people uncomfortable. There's a pattern: With Beowolf There was the whole couple of minuteswatching digital cleavage move back and forth, Beowolf running around naked. The digital Angelina Jolie nude. Then the elves in Polar express reminded me of characters from an Aphex Twins video (good thing they weren't in the movie for very long) In a Christmas Carol Jim Carrey as multiple characters that were mimes or mime like for extended periods of time with an overused smile that became creepy was more than enough to drive lots of people that were expecting a children's film away. It's about the story stupids...
The failure of the films doesn't have anything to do with the technique of how the film was produced
Wrong. The list of fully animated CG features that have succeeded is long and deep. On the other hand, the list of mo-cap failures far outweighs the list of mo-cap successes. Aside from the character of Golum, and the film Avatar, there have been no huge mo-cap successes, but there have been a lot of spectacular studio-ending mo-cap failures.
As of this Sunday evening it looks like the weekend boxoffice for Mars Needs Moms will be 6.8 million. Officially a total bomb and hopefully the end of the horrible Zemeckis motion capture method.
I used to respect Zemeckis, he made a lot of great movies before he got obsessed with mocap. Return to your roots Robert!
The Mo-Cap era is now bookended by two spectacular, studio-closing bombs: Final Fantasy and Mars Needs Moms. In between, there have only been a couple of live-action/animation films that had any success with mo-cap, but all the films that were fully CG have been stinkers. Time to leave this technique to low-end game bullshit.
Some reviews have listed TAG members Bob Hilgenberg & Rob Muir as writers of this film. They did not write this movie.
They wrote a wonderful draft a few years ago, which even after rave reviews from Zemeckis' staff, was "tossed in the trash" by BZ after reading only thirty pages. He told them it was too whimsical and that Mars needed to be “like Nazi Germany with storm troopers roaming the planet".
The disappointed staffers, including partner Jack Rapke, had to scrap the entire Bob & Rob draft and go out and look for new writers. They found Simon and Wendy Wells, who threw out every page and idea from the Bob & Rob script and wrote and directed their own version...under the watchful eye of Bob Zemeckis.
And if the film had been a huge success Rob and Bob would never insinuate they didn't write this movie and would have used that success to leverage their next deal.
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