Fallout

After the weekend grosses, I was kind of expecting this.

Despite getting kicked around by analysts after the disappointing arrival of its “Rise of the Guardians,” DreamWorks Animation made it through trading on Monday without serious damage to its stock price.

“Rise of the Guardians,” a $145 million adventure starring Santa and other childhood fantasy figures, took in $32.3 million at the five-day Thanksgiving box office, the worst opening for a DreamWorks Animation movie since 2006. Investors punished the company’s shares, but only moderately: $17.11 was the closing price, a decrease of a little more than 5 percent from the start of trading. ...

I had occasion to talk to a DWA staffer today who told me that the picture had a first-time director who came onto the project after a long stretch of development, so it was a bit of a bumpy road.

"But the picture is doing well overseas so far, and foreign markets are important to the success of our movies, way more than several years ago. We'll see how it does going forward." ...

I always hold my breath when DWA releases a new movie, since it's the last of the stand-alone studios, unattached to one of our fine, entertainment conglomerates. Therefore it's always doing a high-wire act.

But as the Dreamworker pointed out to me: The company has a movie and television library to draw on now, it's developing projects in China, and it's not the one-trick pony (theatrical motion pictures) that it was a decade ago. Still in all, I wish Guardians had opened stronger.