Box Office Mojo has gotten word that Laika has put one of their untitled projects officially on the map, establishing a release date on September 26, 2014. The movie will be the first time the studio has ventured into the fall months, as Coraline came out in February and ParaNorman made its way to theaters this past August. ...
Given that the project announced today is simply called Untitled Laika Project, it's reasonable for someone to think that it may definitely be an original project (if it were an adaptation it would have a title), but it's also possible that the date is just a goal and they are deciding which is best suited to go into full production.
It's good that Laika is soldiering on with more features. It's first two, Coraline and ParaNorman, garnered some good reviews, but the pictures' grosses did not set the universe on fire:
Worldwide Grosses-
Coraline -- $124.6 million
ParaNorman -- $86.5 million*
Stop-motion pictures have an audience (and some, like Nightmare Before Christmas, have become holiday perennials.) But they pull down a fraction of the box office income enjoyed by top-line CG features, and that dynamic appears to be continuing. (As of Thursday, the CG extravaganza Hotel Transylvania was holding down the #2 position with a $50 million gross, while Finding Nemo -- with an accumulation of $37.4 million -- occupied the 9th spot.)
There are styles of animation beyond the computer-generated variety, and I'm happy somebody is out there creating at least one of them. (I've given up hope of a big-budget, hand-drawn feature getting greenlit anytime soon, so let's get out there and support the puppet movies.)
* Still in release.
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1 comments:
The average movie-goer has no idea that "Coraline" and "ParaNorman" aren't CG . The animation in those films is as slick , detailed , and dimensional as any CG film . (Burton's "The Corpse Bride" was the same ... I knew it was stop-mo ,but a lot of times I had to stop and remind myself that it wasn't CG .) It's got to be something else that didn't connect with the audiences because I don't think the average person is aware of the technique at all.
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