Thursday, April 01, 2010

Fools' Links

On an April evening, the linkage is Springtime fresh.

We get two animated titles high in the DVD sales charts:

Coming in at No. 3 on the DVD sales chart for the week ending March 28 is ... "The Princess and the Frog" ... followed by "The Fantastic Mr. Fox" at No. 7 ...

Charles Solomon reflects on The Secret of the Kells:

Using the scrollwork designs and microscopic detailing of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels likely dating to the early 8th century, "The Secret of Kells" ... evokes the feel of Celtic tradition and a culture long past ....

Wall Street no likee the under-strength opening of Dragon:

... Shares of DreamWorks Animation sunk 8% on Tuesday to $39.34 after "Dragon" posted a $43.7 million overall domestic boxoffice opening and some analysts fired off negative reports to their clients. ...

Scotland's first animated feature is going into its final laps:

... Glasgow-based Billi Productions Ltd and independent studio Glasgow Animation have started post-production including final colorization, lighting and rendering on the new animated family film "Sir Billi" ... Sean Connery has been heavily involved in the making of the film since its inception ...

Mr. Selick returns to the studios of his beginnings:

Henry Selick has signed a deal which will see him back at Disney according to Variety. He got his first start at Disney in the 1970s sharing offices with such luminaries as John Lassetter and Brad Bird ...

I remember ol' Henry as being in an office with Bill Kroyer, but perhaps I forget some of the details.

The worldwide gross of How to Train Your Dragon is now up past $104 million, with the majority of the take coming from the U.S. and Canada. But it's not doing badly in foreign venues:

... How To Train Your Dragon climbed into second place with $30.48 million on 5445 screens in 35 markets for a still early international total of $42.74 million. The film opened in first place in a number of major markets, but its results were less than inspiring. For instance, in Germany it opened with $2.79 million on 664 screens, but that was not that much more than Alice in Wonderland made during its fourth weekend of release in that market. The same can be said of the film's $2.42 million opening on 367 screens in Australia. It only made $2.38 million on 577 screens in its debut in Spain. On the other hand, it did relatively well in Mexico with $2.63 million on 855 screens and in Brazil with $2.45 million on 244 screens. Meanwhile, it was only down 10% in Russia ...

It continues to be a mystery to me why Dragon isn't soaring higher. Enjoy the extended Easter weekend.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

maybe audiences are finally just getting tired of the onslaught of animated movies over the past 10+ years.

it's safe to say the ratio of good to bad animated movies is pretty wide and the amount it costs to go to a movie and the economic times may have an affect. An animated movie used to be a treat for the whole family young and old, they really have lost that something special that once graced an animated film release.

Anonymous said...

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oh. THAT makes a lot of sense....

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Anonymous said...

It seems that once again misleading marketing has led audiences to believe animation is for babies and no one interested in seeing an actual film with engaging characters and storytelling need buy a ticket. Why must these films be undervalued by lazy studio marketing? The marketing dept. should be beyond embarrassed by their shoddy work on selling sort such an amazing film.

Anonymous said...

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Ah, that must be the Wall Street reporter who "no likee" the numbers. ;)

It continues to be a mystery to me why Dragon isn't soaring higher.

On one hand, I could say what we said during Cars and PATF's BO hysteria: It's only the FIRST @#$(&'in WEEK!
(As in, it hasn't even been seven days yet!!)
On the other, I could go into a lot of discussions about whether DW should come to grips that no matter how much the animators themselves love them on principle, the audience might not, and just how exactly THAT happened...But that would be just as conclusion-jumping.

I'm not going to go into Cassandra mode about "See what happens when you start setting bars for the movie to jump over?"...But would it hurt us to actually wait a week or two (and seeing whether Clash's expected big opening does a TF2 dive on its second week on quality), and getting some perspective the audience's ability to isolate the differences between box office and quality?

Anonymous said...

The very concept of "word of mouth" implies the passage of time. I believe Dragons will have major "legs."

If the producers are really concerned about the box office numbers, maybe they can consider dropping the premium charges for a period of time and see what happens. When two adults go to see "Avatar," or Alice, each may be paying one admission price. If an entire family goes to Dragon, that's quite a drop. They would have to be VERY sold on the movie. Not everyone is in the animation business and heard the buzz we have heard all these months.

Anonymous said...

Dragon isn't soaring higher just because.

No one knows anything.

RELEASE THE MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING!

Anonymous said...

I agree with above comments. The new 3D pricing may have reached a cutoff point above which more people decide not to go to a movie than the higher price makes up for.

Steve Hulett said...

The robo spam! Alays the robo spam!

Anonymous said...

I can tell you for myself, I am no longer excited to see new movies in the 3D format. It is 110% because of the price increases. I'll still go see a select few movies just because of the movies themselves. (Toy Story 3 is an example), but I think the rest of my movie time will be spent in the second run theatres saving some money.

Anonymous said...

Very few DVD sales charts display the number of units sold each week and how much that amounts to in dollars.

"The Numbers" box-office site is about 2 weeks behind in reporting DVD sales on PATF.

As of March 21 they report that The Princess and the Frog made $31,809,268 in it's first week on DVD.

Add $31,809,268 to the overall Box-Office take so far , $269,339,128 and Froggy has generated $301,148,396.

(and there are two more weeks' worth of DVD sales figures that haven't yet been posted on The Numbers.)

By way of comparison, "Bolt" generated $25,577,733 its' first week on DVD. Bolt went on to make a total of $81,884,048 on DVD. Previously "Meet the Robinsons" had made $22,698,232 during its' first week on DVD.

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