Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Final Numbers

... pointing to the continued muscularity of le feature de animation.

'Gnomeo' Makes Gains on 'Unknown' at President's Day Weekend Box Office

... Gnomeo & Juliet, buoyed by an especially good Monday, turns out to have nearly tied with Liam Neeson action pic Unknown for the President's Day weekend box office crown. ...

Which means it isn't just Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky Animation that has success at the animation box office. When you have the director of Shrek II at the helm, you can (apparently) also count Starz Animation, Toronto as one of the players.

... Building on its success as Canada’s leading production studio for digital animation, Starz Animation Toronto has recently opened a visual effects and creature animation wing to leverage its strong reputation for quality and reliability into the live action market. ...

Nothing powers a business plan forward like success.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm interested in seeing when, or if, someone will take another chance at a feature cartoon for adults. Simpsons did well, but it had brand support. As far as I know Aqua Teen, Beavis and Butthead, and Southpark all, at least, recouped their (small) budgets, but I can't think of anything original in the past ten or so years outside things like Persepolis that weren't mainly built for kids. Pixar and Dreamworks have certainly done their best to make movies for everyone, but I'm still waiting for the movie that obliterates the 'all cartoons are for kids' problem. Although considering how dug in that problem is, it might take a few movies to pull it off.

rufus said...

Whenever an 'adult' animated feature is made, it fails to succeed. Could anonymous 8:45 even name one successful 'adult' animated feature?

People didn't exactly welcome 'Triplets' with open arms...

r

Anonymous said...

Made in the 1970s, but Fritz the Cat was a big hit. Still is the highest grossing independent animated film of all-time.

wtf said...

Pffffft! That's like 40 years ago!!!

Anonymous 8:45 said...

As Anonymous 8:45, I'm not saying past adult features have succeeded (outside of Simpsons... which was in my initial post), just that the ones based on shows mostly recouped their budget. What I'm saying is that I'm curious whether the increasing number of profitable cartoons, in general, in moviedom, could mean that at some point someone could take a risk and try to and pull one off successfully... and maybe even succeed.

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