Meledandri's Secrets

Bloomberg profiles a successful animation producer not named Katzenberg or Lasseter.

... Asked what’s behind Universal’s turnaround from fourth place in 2012, Ron Meyer, NBCUniversal’s vice chairman, simply said, “We hired Chris Meledandri.”...

Despicable Me 2 has sold more than $840 million in tickets worldwide, and cost only $76 million. ... “What [Chris Meledandri] is demonstrating today is that you can make very good movies at a reasonable cost,” says Peter Chernin, the former CEO of Fox Entertainment. ...

Meledandri’s films attract an audience that’s as much over age 18 as under it. “The humor is sophisticated and topical,” says Paul Dergarabedian, who heads box office research at the website Hollywood.com. “They’re making them not only kid-friendly, but friendly for thinking adults.” ...

Meledandri’s U.S. office has only about 35 employees. To bring his projects to life, however, Universal acquired the animation business of Mac Guff, a studio in Paris with a staff of almost 500. Making movies in France isn’t about chasing cheap labor. Animators there make slightly lower salaries than in the U.S., Meledandri says, but benefits costs are much higher. Those animators, many of whom used to make pictures solely for the French market, are pros at working on limited budgets ...

Others have attempted to make lower-cost animated features; almost all have failed. (They did the lower cost part pretty well, but the "turn a profit" part of the equation eluded them.)

Mr. Meledandri has created a business model where his company, Illumination Entertainment, produces the pictures for a price, and the results still pull in sizable audiences.

This has actually been done before. Walt Disney made Pinocchio for $3.35 million (1939 dollars) and failed to break even. Whereupon he created Dumbo for $950,000 (1941 dollars) and made a tidy profit. The same thing happened two decades later. Sleeping Beauty was one of the most expensive animated features ever made in its time, and enjoyed little in the way of profits. Then 101 Dalmations -- the next feature out of the starting gate -- was made for 60% of what Beauty cost, and became a popular favorite generating lots of cash.

Chris Meledandri isn't the first producer of efficiently made yet highly popular animated features. He's just the most accomplished practitioner of that particular art form who is currently in business.