This Little Light ...

... from the candle of organized labor.

Employees at a Volkswagen plant in the state of Tennessee decided to organize for the first time since foreign automakers set up shop in the business-friendly South, which is known for its low rate of unionization.

The United Auto Workers won a breakthrough representation election Friday at the Volkswagen AG plant in Chattanooga. ... The National Labor Relations Board, which supervised the process, said 71 percent of employees voted to join during the two-day election, which began Thursday. ...

Because of its non-union status, the Chattanooga plant is the only Volkswagen plant in the world without representation on the Volkswagen Global Group Works Council. ...

The UAW has been knocked on its backside at the Chattanooga factory before. Almost three years ago, the UAW lost a close vote at the same plant. (It's happened to TAG at cartoon studios, so we feel for them).

There are 1450 manufacturing jobs at the Tennessee plant, and the UAW has now organized 11% of them. Now comes the hard part: after the legal challenges from Volkswagen are overcome, the union needs to build a culture with the skilled craftsman inside the plant. In a right-to-work state, this is totally necessary, but it's also a fine idea in its own right. Hold meetings, throw parties, and generally make the union as transparent and accessible as possible.

Corporations in the United States, circa 2015, have never been more powerful, so the UAW has a challenging hill to climb. We wish them good luck.

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Your American Box Office

Two cartoon features continue in the Box Office Eleven.

WEEKEND DOMESTIC GROSSES

1). The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (LGF), 4,086 theaters (-89) / $5.7M Fri. (-73%) / 3-day cume: $18.8M (-64%) /Total cume: $227.3M/Wk 3

2). Krampus (U/Legendary), 2,902 theaters / $6.05M Fri. / 3-day cume: $15.3M /Wk 1

3). The Good Dinosaur (DIS), 3,749 theaters / $3.4M Fri. (-78%) / 3-day cume: $15.1M (-61%)/Total cume: $75.6M/Wk 2

4). Creed (MGM/New Line/WB), 3,424 theaters (+20) / $4.6M Fri. (-61%) / 3-day cume: $14.6M (-51%)/Total cume: $64.2M /Wk 2

5). Spectre (SONY/MGM), 2,840 theaters (-100)/ $1.6M Fri. (-69%)/ 3-day cume: $5.6M (-57%)/Total cume: $184.6M /Wk 5

6). The Night Before (SONY), 2,794, theaters (-166)/ $1.58M Fri.(-51%)/ 3-day cume: $4.9M (-41%)/Total cume: $32M/Wk 3

7). The Peanuts Movie (FOX), 2,917 theaters (-172)/ $782K Fri. (-80%) / 3-day cume: $3.4M (-60%)/Total cume: $121.3M /Wk 5

8). Spotlight (OPRD), 980 theaters (+83) / $828K Fri. (-50%) / 3-day cume: $2.9 (-35%) /Total cume: $16.6M /Wk 5

9). Brooklyn (FSL), 906 theaters (+61) / $744K Fri. (-49%)/3-day cume: $2.7M (-32%)/Total cume: $11.4M /Wk 5

10). Secret In Their Eyes (STX), 2,147 theaters (-245) / $605K Fri.(-64%) / 3-day cume: $2M (-54%)/Total cume: $17.3M/Wk 3

11). The Martian (FOX), 1,140 theaters (-280) / $453K Fri. (-66%)/ 3-day cume: $1.6M (-50%)/ Total cume: $220.8M / Wk 10 ...

Both Peanuts and The Good Dinosaur endure sizable drops weekend to weekend, before Christmas vacation gets into full swing.

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At the Diz TVA

I visited the newest Disney TVA studio yesterday, this one located to the east of Disney's Sonora Avenue studio in Glendale.

This latest is in the heart of Glendale on Brand Boulevard, and has two series housed inside it. ...

The larger unit is for multiple episodes of a 2017 show that Disney XD announced last May.

The second series, not yet announced, has only a few story and development people on board, and is in the embryonic stages of its production life.

This new Glendale studio, built out last summer, makes the third facility Diz TVA has up and running. There's a sizable studio near the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, the studio on Sonora Avenue (near the site of the old Grand Central Airport), and now the Brand Boulevard establishment.

(Over the years, Disney TVA has been nothing if not peripatetic.

In its almost thirty years of existence, it's been located on the Disney Burbank lot, at the TV Academy Center in North Hollywood, at a site near the Lakeside Country Club, just off Riverside Drive in Toluca Lake, and now at three different sites in nearby Glendale. And I'm leaving a couple of locations off this list because they happened before my business representative stint so I've no idea where they were.)

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Fates Sealed

On this date in 1941, Japanese carriers and their accompanying task force was steaming toward the Hawaiian islands, and a whole lot of things were about to change.

Also, too, Hoppity Goes To Town, the Fleischer Brothers second animated feature, was released.

As President Emeritus tom Sito tells us, the picture was ...

Max Fleischer's last gamble to keep up with Walt Disney, and keep his studio alive. Songs written by top pop song writer Hoagy Carmichael. ...

The picture received generally favorable reviews, but Pearl Harbor happened days later and it died a quick death at the box office.

Of course, what's forgotten now is that most animated features at the time were dying at the box office. Pinocchio didn't make its costs back. Fantasia was a bomb. Gulliver's Travels had turned a profit, but Hoppity/Mr. Bug was a large, dark hole into which Paramount Pictures poured money and got little in return. Only Dumbo, Disney's lower budget feature, made any money that particular year.

But even before the Fleischers' second feature was released, the Paramount mothership purchased the company from the squabbling brothers and redubbed it Famous Studios.

Though Hoppity ended up kaput and Max and Dave were without a corporate home, but Famous went on for decades. Once in a while even a disaster has a happy ending.

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Everything You Wanted To Know About MPIPHP ...

... (that's the Motion Picture Industry Pension and Health Plan) but were afraid ... or too preoccupied to ask.

From time to time, when I'm loping through a studio or gaping at the computer screen in my office, somebody comes up asks questions about the MPI Health Plan or MPI Pension Plan.

Like "How much pension am I going to get?" or "When do I qualify for a pension?" or "Is there enough money in the fund to pay my pension?"

Here are a few answers (and please go to the link above for way more details). Here are a few bullet points ...

The Individual Account part of the pension contains $3.745 billion.

The Defined Benefit Part of the pension (that the monthly annuity) contains $3.247 billion.

The Active Health Plan costs $12,000 per eligible per year.

Residuals paid to MPIPHP (supplemental markets and post sixties) -- $429 million.

To qualify for the Retiree Health Plan:

Age 62 with 15 Qualified Pension Years and 20,000 Contribution Hours (three years after age 40; 1 year after 2000)

Age 62 with 20 QUalified Pension Years and 20,000 Contribution Hours

Age 61 with 30 Qualified Pension Years and 55,000 Contribution Hours

Age 60 with 30 Qualified Pension Years and 60,000 Contribution Hours

We repeat this information from time to time because people tend to forget what pension and health benefits they've accumulated ... and some folks never absorb the information in the first place.

(Remember, there are two Motion Picture Industry pension plans, and three if you count the Animation Guild's 401(k) Plan).


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Stillborn Disney Pilot

So sad.

Square Enix and Disney had plans for a Kingdom Hearts television adaptation, but the project was ultimately canceled.

... An animated adaptation was put into production following the success of the first Kingdom Hearts, which released on PlayStation 2 back in 2002.

Story board artist Seth Kearsley of Disney's television animation division was hired to write and direct a pilot for the potential series.

Despite testing well with audiences, however, Disney and Square Enix decided to scrap the project because it was a "vastly different interpretation" of the original game's story. With plans for additional games, there was concern the show would conflict with the overall plot. ...

I don't know how tough it would have been to carve a series from the video game, but apparently something snagged on something.

What's always tough is to get a series launched at Disney TVA, because the division's execs have their time consuming strategies: Testing ... focus groups ... more testing ... then a final round of focuse groups (just for luck) and then ... Series!

If the creators are lucky.

As for the Channel, it's fine with policies the way they are. Because as nutsy and time-consuming as some might appear to be, they work fine for the folks who concoct them. Ratings are up, Synergy is percolating right along, and Diz Co. is spinning out mile-high profits. So what's not to like?

Maybe the fact that Kingdom Hearts has not conquered additional media?

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Not Gonna Take It Anymore

Word reaches us that BECTU, the big entertainment union in the United Kingdom, is organizing VFX house Motion Picture Company (MPC):

The VFX branch of BECTU has given formal notice to MPC’s management that the Compositing Department at MPC are unionising, and will be applying for union recognition.

Yesterday (2nd Dec. 2015), MPC responded to this, and called the entire comp department (over 130 people) into a short meeting. They announced that the company had received a petition from BECTU for recognition of the union for the comp department.

They announced that they will begin negotiations with BECTU, and that they intend to fight this bid for union recognition. They took no questions, and made no attempt to justify the excessive unpaid overtime in the VFX industry, or other issues that have made this recognition bid necessary. ...

Visual effects is really the last frontier of unionized motion picture work.

Pretty much every other aspect of moviedom is performed under a collective bargaining agreement. But every other aspect has been part of production since forever. Digital visual effects, of course, came into existence after labor's collective strength had commenced its decline, and ... here we are.

When live-action VFX became a significant presence inside film production during the nineties, the CG artisans with significant experience were few and far between. And ... let's be frank about this ... these folks were self-confident about their ability to secure and retain high-paying jobs all by themselves because their skill-sets were at a premium in the marketplace. I had more than one visual effects employee tell me in the go-go nineties: "What do I need a g.d. union for?! I get five g.d. job offers a month! I make my own deals!"

And they did. And they thrived. For awhile.

But, over time, Adam Smith's law of supply-and-demand has a way of catching up and leveling the sunny meadow in which highly paid employees frolic. Such is the case with the visual effects industry. The compositors, animators, surfacers and others who used to command respect and top dollar now find themselves abused in the same special way every other non-union movie employee gets trampled. There's lots of under-paid and/or uncompensated hours to work, lots of unreasonable demands, lots of insane schedules.

And so now a large chunk of the employees at the Motion Picture Company have had enough, and are standing up. It's high freaking time, and we wish them all a speedy victory in this latest battle for less maltreatment and fairer compensation.

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Live-Action VFX

"Seamless" visual effects are the order of the 21st century. When I was a tot, invisible effects were mostly impossible. Audiences were often aware of matte-lines, focused on the fact that the man walking across Niagara Falls on a high wire in "The Big Circus" looked like he was anywhere but over actual water.

But that was in 1959. In 2015, the death defiance in The Walk looks realer than real. ...

It’s been a transformative year for the art of visual effects, demonstrated not only by the increasingly ordinary and realistic depiction of advanced technology or destructive superpowers, but also the elaborate recreation of mundane details like office curtains, or space station floor tiles. Two-time Oscar nominee Richard Stammers was tasked with both the mundane and fantastic as visual effects supervisor on Fox’s The Martian. Kevin Baillie faced entirely different difficulties for Sony’s The Walk, using an enormous number of effects to recreate normal life in the 1970s. ...

The reality of visual effects today: They're done worldwide. The top artists/techinicans work in Montreal, then n London, then in New Zealand.

And now that Free Money has become available for visual effects in California, more work has drifted back to Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Truly amazing what government subsidies will do to nudge free enterprise along.

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Samurai!

We've known about this for some time, but now that it's been announced, well ...



I was hanging out with staffers at Cartoon Network today. They told me that one of the reasons the renewed SJ is on "Adult Swim" instead of your normal every-day Cartoon Network is because execs pitched Genndy that the Swim would afford him more creative freedom.

If it's better for an episode to be more violent, it can be made that way There are far fewer restrictions regarding content on the Network's late night block than there would be during earlier hours.

The good news for TAG is the show will be done at Cartoon Network's Burbank studios. Adult Swim brass have a penchant for making the adult shows under non-signator banners (think early Rick and Morty). Happily, this won't be the case for Samurai Jack.

We're also told that a lot of the old crew will be returning for the newer edition.

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Art From a Mugging

I know Paul Dini a wee bit, but I didn't know this.

... In 1993, [Mr. Dini], the co-creator of Batman villain Harley Quinn (being played by Margot Robbie in next summer’s Suicide Squad) and winner of several Emmys for writing Batman animated shows, was walking down La Peer Drive in Los Angeles one evening when two men approached him and mugged him. It was so bad that parts of his head were shattered – his zygomatic arch, for one — while parts of his skull “powdered on impact,” according to the doctors. He needed surgery.

Now, more than two decades later, Dini is revisiting that traumatic event with a highly personal graphic novel. Coming in June 2016, the book isn’t an indie but rather hails from DC’s imprint Vertigo and features the Caped Crusader and his rogues' gallery as a kind of Greek chorus. Titled Dark Night: A True Batman Story, it is one of the most autobiographical books ever published by the company. ...

Everybody is formed to a greater or lesser degree by their life experiences. (The old phrase, "Beaten children become child beaters," comes to mind.)

But it's admirable that Paul Dini has the strength of character to take something horrific and build. I doubt I could go within a country mile of an experience like that. I would blank it out, but Mr. Dini has built his art on it.

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The Annie Awards!

And now the envelope! If you please! (You know, the one with the press release.)

The International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood, announced nominations today for its 43rd Annual Annie Awards™ recognizing the year’s best in the field of animation. (Here's the site with more details.)

The Annie Awards cover 36 categories and include Best Animated Feature, Best Animated Feature-Independent (new this year), Special Productions, Commercials, Short Subjects, Student Films and Outstanding Individual Achievements, as well as the honorary Juried Awards. The winners will be announced at a black tie ceremony on Saturday, February 6, 2016 at UCLA’s Royce Hall. A pre-reception and press line begins at 5:00 pm with the awards ceremony following at 7:00 pm. A post-show celebration immediately follows the ceremony. All events will be held at Royce Hall.

This year’s Best Animated Feature nominations include: Anomalisa (Paramount Pictures), Inside Out (Pixar Animation Studios), Shaun the Sheep The Movie (Aardman Animations), The Good Dinosaur (Pixar Animation Studios), and The Peanuts Movie (Blue Sky Studios, Twentieth Century Fox Animation).

“This year we introduced an important new category – Best Feature-Independent,” says ASIFA-Hollywood President, Jerry Beck. “We will now recognize not only features in wide release, but also the independent animators, international studios, anime and special productions that might not otherwise get the attention they deserve. Adds Frank Gladstone, ASIFA-Hollywood's Executive Director, “With the growing capability worldwide to produce a wider range of animated features, we are certain that this award will expand in significance and influence going forward.”

The inaugural Best Animated Feature-Independent nominations include: Boy And the World (Filme de Papel), Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet (Ventanarosa), The Boy and The Beast (Studio Chizu), and When Marnie Was There (Studio Ghibli).

The Juried Awards honoring career achievement and exceptional contributions to animation will also be presented. Three Winsor McCay recipients have been selected by the ASIFA-Hollywood Board of Directors – Joe Ranft, Phil Roman and Isao Takahata for their career contributions to the art of animation; and the June Foray recipient – Don Hahn for his significant and benevolent or charitable impact on the art and industry of animation.

“We are also developing procedures that will allow us to include virtual reality projects into a widening list of Annie categories,” added Gladstone. “Each year we see a steady increase in submissions, too. The Annie Awards is becoming an even more encompassing celebration of the best talent and most remarkable projects in the animation industry.” ...

Once upon a time, the Annies were a very minor deal. Animation was a small and sleepy sub-set of REAL movie-making, and if you were interested in animation you were either eight years old or a nerd.

My, how times have changed. Animation is now the most profitable segment of filmdom, and live-action directors are moving into the feature animation field (where it used to be the other way around.)

And now the Annies are often a precursor to other awards, and studios elbow and joust to win a shiny trophy. So yeah, the Annies have kind of arrived.

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Lovable

... more than angry.



Seems like they are going for that Minions energy.

And the animated features keep coming.

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Speaking of Heights of Glory ...

Even the mighty sometimes drop down a rung or two. The Good Dinosaur's grosses are not (apparently) super robust by Pixarian standards:

... While Pixar's latest animated feature garnered $39.1 million in its first three days and $56.6 million domestically for the entirety of the Thanksgiving weekend, the dinosaur flick had the weakest launch of any film released by the animation company, ever. ...

Many knew there were ... ahm ... issues, no? It wasn't a secret. Directors replaced. Release dates shifted. There were portents.

Making an animated movie is hard. There are no movie stars to root for, just the artists' blood, sweat and tears, the writers' and animators' crafts, the surfacers' and lighters' aesthetic choices. And sometimes the story doesn't come together and the through-line is muddy and there's too many ideas pulling in too many directions. And all the patching and restructuring helps, but it doesn't have that flow, and what the hell are you gonna do?

As a grizzled old feature director said to me eons ago: "You've gotta convince the audience it's real and worth caring about. Because there aren't any real people up there to help you do it. There's nothing up there but drawings and colors." ...

Today the "drawings" thingie would be "pixels." But the same idea.

And so The Good Dinosaur didn't land with a thwacking ker-thud, but there were no bands marching and fireworks bursting after its first weekend either. Disney/Pixar merely got an "okay" opening. But if the bottom doesn't fall out through the holidays, and overseas markets hold up, the movie should make money.

And Pixar's record will remain intact.

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Twelve Years Ago This Day ...

Roy Disney departs Diz Co. President Emeritus Tom Sito recalls::

November 30, 2003 - Roy Disney Jr, the last serving member of the Disney family, was forced to resign from the Walt Disney Company.

It was claimed to be the mandatory retirement policy, but more likely he was forced out by the exec he hired to run the company in 1984- Michael Eisner. So Roy built a successful grass roots stockholders campaign SaveDisney.com.

In 2005 Eisner was compelled to retire after the first vote of no confidence in the companies history. Roy Disney kept an emeritus board position until his death in 2009. ...

In point of fact, Roy Disney jumped from the good ship Mouse before he was shoved overboard. At one of the Guild's Christmas parties Roy told me ...

They didn't fire me off the company board of directors. They were going to, but I quit before they could do it. I could see the thing coming.

Michael had gotten pretty nasty. He wouldn't let me attend animation meetings in the hat Building. He kept me out of my office over there. So I could see the handwriting on the wall, you know? And I resigned. ...

Roy related all this when he was out in the corporate wilderness, running a guerrilla campaign against CEO Eisner. Over the next several months he and Stanley Gold went to state pension plans and large mutual funds and talked to boards and large stockholders about voting aginst Michael Eisner on the next proxy ballot.

Disney's stock was down, its profits were off, and Roy and Stan got listened to. At the next stockholders' meeting, 42% of the ballots were marked against Eisner and much of the Disney board. It's hard for a corporate chieftain to survive a vote total like that, and Michael Eisner didn't. Within eighteen months he was gone, Roy was allowed to participate in company affairs again, and the Walt Disney Company rocketed on to new heights of glory.

The remarkable take-away for me? The son of Disney's co-founder took down two chief executives of the same conglomerate, almost exactly twenty years apart.

And h/t to Professor Sito for letting us steal his stuff.

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Pixar Top Kick

Pixar President Jim Morris speaks of The Good Dinosaur and other things.

... Pixar have had 15 films, each one of them a major hit, generating $9.3 billion at the box-offices – so, stepping up to the plate can be a nerve-wracking experience.

Jim Morris: Yeah, each new director and producer fears that they’re going to be the one that screws the run up, but, you know, we wanted to increase the output, primarily because we have so many people in Pixar. Trying to get one and a half movies out every year is a tough call, and we’ll always put the quality first, quantity second. So, we’re learning, and we’re cautiously progressing, when it comes to producing more films. ...

Pixar has made good movies and less good movies. This is not a lot different than other animation studios.

The wide moat that divides Pixar from its competition is that it's never turned out a money loser. No other studio can claim that.

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International Derby

Where we observe which movie is doing what at the worldwide box office.

Weekend Foreign Box Office -- (World Totals)

Hunger Games -- $62,000,000 -- ($440,712,341)

The Good Dinosaur -- $28,700,000 -- ($84,265,000)

The Martian -- $51,350,000 -- ($545,140,849)

Spectre -- $30,400,000 -- ($749,556,967)

The Peanuts Movie -- 000 -- ($125,757,472)

Hotel Transylvania 2 -- $4,700,000 -- ($436,750,072) ...

Three years ago, Hotel Transylvania collected $358,375,603 in world grosses, on a budget of $85 million. Its successor is close to $100 million above that, with a production budget of $80 million, owing to the face that A) production has now moved to Canada, the Land of Free Money, and B) many elements from the first movie were carried to the second, lowering some costs.

And our fine entertainment journals inform us:

... The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 feathered the nest with $62M in 92 total markets. That’s down about 57% from the debut last week. ...

Disney/Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur put down 58% of its international footprint in 39 territories for $28.7M. The story of Arlo and Spot is going out in a staggered release pattern. ... Audiences in the U.S. were 40% 12 & Under and 79% families, and that family play works as a strength given the current and upcoming competitive landscape in some of the individual overseas markets. In what’s looked at as a marathon run, rather than a sprint, the thinking is that word of mouth will also continue to bring older audiences into theaters. ...

Hotel Transylvania 2 checked into seven more markets this frame, scaring up $4.7M from nearly 4,800 screens in 75 total. The offshore cume on the Adam Sandler sequel is now $269.9M. Among the new plays was Australia where it was the top opener at $1.8M from 414 screens, outpacing HT1. ...

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The Failure of Movie Magic

Robert Zemeckis is a stylish movie director.

He knows how to move his camera better than any motion picture top-kick this side of Michael Curtiz. He chooses interesting subjects and attacks them with zest. Back to the Future. Romancing the Stone. Forrest Gump. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Zemeckis had an ingrained habit of directing blockbusters.

Even his least satisfying movies, those forays into motion capture that left audiences cold, had moments to recommend them. So it's one of the mysteries of the age why The Walk, which garnered great reviews and positive audience response, was stillborn.

I mean with a thirty-five million dollar production budget where every nickel counted, he couldn't miss. (See the seamless, vfx bullseyes here.) ...

Sadly, miss he did. Even with positive reviews and an A- Cinemascore, Sony couldn't get his latest movie airborne, and The Walk collected a mere $41,761,174 in worldwide grosses. So the picture isn't going to lose a lot of money, but it won't make much of anything, either.

Few, it seems, wanted to see a French wire-walker trek between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

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Extended Weekend Box Office

The money is pouring in ... for women with bows and arrows. And lovable cartoon characters.

TURKEY HOLIDAY MOVIE GROSSES

1). The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (LGF), 4,175 theaters (0) / $21.5M Fri. (+107%) / 3-day cume: $50.3M (-51%) /5-day cume:$74.4M /Total cume: $197.1M/Wk 2

2). The Good Dinosaur (DIS), 3,749 theaters / $15.6M Fri. (+138%) / 3-day cume: $39.5M /5-day cume: $55.9M /Wk 1

3). Creed (MGM/New Line/WB), 3,404 theaters / $11.7M Fri. (+81%) / 3-day cume: $28.7M /5-day cume: $41.1M /Wk 1

4). Spectre (SONY), 2,940 theaters (-719)/ $5.26M Fri. (+96%)/ 3-day cume: $12.76M (-15%)/5-day cume: $18.4M/ Total cume: $176.3M /Wk 4

5). The Peanuts Movie (FOX), 3,006 theaters (-665)/ $3.99M Fri. (+177%) / 3-day cume: $9.8M (-26%)/5-day cume:$13.7M/Total cume: $116.9M /Wk 4

6). The Night Before (SONY), 2,960, theaters (0)/ $3.23M Fri.(+90%)/ 3-day cume: $8M (-19%)/5-day cume:/Total: $11.36M/Total cume: $23.9M/Wk 2

Spotlight7). Secret In Their Eyes (STX), 2,392 theaters / $1.68M Fri.(+126%) / 3-day cume: $4.3M (-35%)/5-day: $5.77M/Total cume: $13.8M/Wk 2

8). Spotlight (OPRD), 897 theaters (+299) / $1.66M Fri. (+187%) / 3-day cume: $4.2 (+19%) /5-day:$5.46M/ Total cume: $12.1M /Wk 4

9). Brooklyn (FSL), 824 theaters (+713) / $1.4M Fri. (+188%)/3-day cume: $3.7M (+219%)/5-day: $4.7M/Total cume: $7.1M /Wk 4

10). The Martian (FOX), 1,407 theaters (-679) / $1.34M Fri. (+109%)/ 3-day cume: $3.23M (-15%)/5-day: $4.48M/ Total cume: $218.6M / Wk 9 ...

And the trades say:

The Good Dinosaur saw a 33% decline on Thanksgiving with $6.56M in second place, bringing its total B.O. over two days to $16.37M. It’s going to pop today and Saturday thanks to family matinees. Current industry forecast for the animated film directed by Peter Sohn is $57M-$59M over five days. ...

No. 6 is 20th Century Fox’s The Peanuts Movie $1.44M (-42%), five-day: $12M-$14.5M, cume to date: $107M ...

It'll be interesting to see how Peanuts holds through the holidays. Might not make it to the $150 million level after all.

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The First American Long-Form Cartoon

We're not talking Snow White here, but this:



Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor was released 79 years ago today. ...

Sinbad was the first of three Technicolor featurettes made by Dave and Max Fleischer, back when they were in hot and heavy competition with Walt Disney Productions. (Disney's exclusive use of full-spectrum color had ended the year before.)

All three Popeye specials are public domain now, but they hold up well. And this first, before the 1937 strike, before the Fleischer Studios' relocation from New York City to sun-kissed Miami (which was a contributing factor in the studio's ultimate demise), can be considered part of the high-water mark for two animation pioneers who, by rights, should be remembered more than they are.

It wasn't just about Walt Disney, after all. It was also about Max and Dave.

H/t -- President Emeritus Tom Sito.

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Charlie Brown Resurgent

ABC (as did CBS before it) runs and runs this animated half-hour.

... "We thought A Charlie Brown Christmas was a little slow, and it was certainly not a traditional Christmas show," said Lee Mendelson, the producer who persuaded "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz to adapt his popular strip about lovable loser Charlie Brown and his childhood friends into an animated holiday offering. ...

The story above points out how the producer of ACBC believed the show about a Loser would be a loser. (In Tinseltown, almost always somebody thinks they've got a flop on their hands, and are proven resoundingly wrong.)

But there is a better, unremarked story underneath the Times article that involves animator/director Bill Melendez ... and Disney.

Mr. Melendez, owner-operator of the studio that made A Charlie Brown Christmas, was one of the artist-strikers out on the sidewalk in front of Walt Disney Productions, way back in 1941, when Art Babbit, Bill Melendez and numerous others walked out in a labor action designed to get Disney employees recognition under the Screen Cartoonists Guild. The picketing was lengthy and bitter. After the strike was over, Mr. Melendez never went back to WDP, and didn't want to.

He told me once: "I'm never going back there! I'm STILL on strike!"

And Bill's issues with Disney didn't end with that '41 job action. Ten years later, Walt Disney -- not a man who forgot old betrayals -- was trying to dislodge the Screen Cartoonists Guild as the labor union repping animation artists inside WDP's gates. IATSE representative Roy Brewer plotted with Walt to set up a NEW organization called the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists (now called the Animation Guild), Local 839, IATSE. The plan was to replace the old union (SCG) with the new one.

In an industry-wide election, the Screen Cartoonists Guild was pushed out, and Local 839 was ushered in. (Many of Walt's key creative personnel had their names on Local 839's founding documents, which ought to tell you something.) At the time, Bill Melendez was the President of the Screen Cartoonists Guild, and he didn't forget what had happened to the guild he'd led. Years later, when he formed Bill Melendez Productions, his studio signed with the Teamsters union, not Local 839.

"I'm STILL on strike!"

So of course, ABC now controls the rights to one of Bill Melendez's great cartoon achievements, and ABC is owned by the Walt Disney Company.

Nothing is forever.

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