End of Summer Animation Totals

On the domestic side:

Brave -- $232.7 million

Madagascar 3 -- $214.9 million

Ice Age, Continental Drift -- $156.3 million

And worldwide:

Brave -- $470.3 million

Madagascare 3 -- $602.9 million

Ice Age, Continental Drift -- $828.8 million

It doesn't appear that animation projects are devouring each other; one seems to reinforce another. And it's been this way for awhile.

Take, for instance, the situation of feature-length cartoons a half-dozen years ago:

... 2006 had an unprecedented number of major animated feature films released, and a particularly amazing number of CG features (12 this year, compared to five last year, four in 2004, and one in 2003). Because of this, lots of people have been speculating that this was the year CG animation would hit the wall, the way hand-drawn features did a few years ago, and we'd be awash in major animated busts. Cue the funeral dirge . . .

But stop the music, and take a look at a list of the box-office leaders for the year. What's that? Four of the top eight films in 2006 were fully animated? (And we'll note that animators had a big hand in three of the remaining four on that list.). . .

There's Cars at number two, then Ice Age: The Meltdown, Over the Hedge, and Happy Feet (the latter with a bullet) in slots six, seven, and eight, respectively. So if the public got sick of these films, they had a pretty odd way of showing it. ...

Year after year, animation has been consistently profitable. The market continues not to be saturated.