Why did so many animated movies flop this year?
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Why did so many animated movies flop this year?
Why did so many animated movies flop this year?
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Everything did.
Except Barbenheimer. And Mario.
Film industry hasn't recovered yet and people seem to be wary of animated films that aren't big recognizable IPs
You can't blame covid anymore. None of the animated movies that bombed were good and CERTAIN franchises have overstayed their welcome. This biggest factor is quality. It's why the only successful superhero movies were Guardians 3 and Spider-Verse.
Another factor not taken seriously in the press, but hard to ignore this year, is that families are unironically spooked by the woke stuff. It doesn't mean people are racist or sexist or whatever twitter losers like to throw around, it just means they don't want to waste their time being lectured when they're looking for entertainment. It explains Elemental's strange performance. People avoided it on principle because it was Disney and it had an abysmal opening. Then people realized it was just a cute romance story and the immigrant elements were portrayed positively. People saw "fire people and water people fall in love" and accepted it as something that was a pretty universal story without any weird corporate meta elements like Wish.
As for Ruby Gillman, idk. I guess it was just a story absolutely no one was interested in. It's failure was so catastrophic it's just kind of funny. It did so bad when people talk about movies that bombed this year they forget it exists. I like DreamWorks, but christ.
>families are unironically spooked by the woke stuff.
But they saw Barbie and Across the Spider-Verse, so what's your cope for that.
Barbie isn't a family movie (and it's a litmus test movie, I thought it made fun of women just as much as men). Spider-Verse is visually exciting action movie foremost. The real world isn't Cinemaphile where any presence of a black person makes people rage. People can detect whether a movie has political lecturing as priority #1 vs. entertainment that happens to have a diverse cast.
>People can detect whether a movie has political lecturing as priority #1 vs. entertainment that happens to have a diverse cast.
Guess Spider-Verse flew under that radar somehow
It made money because it’s fricking Spider-Man.
The discussion was whether audiences can detect political motivation in a movie
>This biggest factor is quality
I'm hard pressed to buy that performance is heavily correlated with quality, especially not when the Minions studio is eating so well and Trolls/Paw Patrol are not especially better than Ruby Gilman
Ruby Gillman is not good, so I don't know what point you were trying to make there. Trolls and Paw Patrol were actually better received if you look into it.
But I get what you're saying. Maybe it's more accurate to say the biggest factor is perceived quality from target audiences. I hate Illumination movies, but they have a clearly defined audience, and the Mario movie was beloved by them. Even Migration is kind of doing ok after its disappointing opening like what Elemental did. Compared to Disney who also has a very clearly defined audience, but that audience has perceived these new movies are "betraying them" and stay away.
Migration is doing just fine at the box office. Christmas can be deceiving. Just look at Puss in Boots 2.
Ruby Gillman likely failed due to its artstyle.
There's no way Elemental isn't far more agenda-driven than something like Wish. It's weird how the tone surrounding the movie changed as soon as it started to break even
Wish just sucked what's there to say. Ridiculous movie. Elemental was not a ridiculous movie.
The entire plot of Wish was some bizarre allegory for new talent at Disney Animation Studio trying to force a regime change against a leader who sticks to traditions. All of the songs and fantasy tropes feel like after-thoughts because they were. People are confused that the villain is the most understandable character because the stakes/motivations of the heroes are too abstract. It's not good vs. evil, it has something to do with giving recognition to voices and establishing a story trust. You may disagree, but that's my point. Nobody can agree what the movie is actually going for.
In comparison, Elemental is easier to understand. You don't need to keep up with all the nuances of 2020s real life studio drama to know why the story is the way it is. It's hard to argue with people that can't accept
because they forget what stories have been like for centuries before social media drama. Elemental is not that far removed from Romeo and Juliet, normal people recognize that without thinking it's race-mixing propaganda. Other people never will, and I'm fine with that, but we happen to post on the same board and it's still worth trying to find common ground. Despite it masquerading as a classic Disney nostalgia tribute, there's no children's movie blueprint for Wish's story of eight multicultural activists trying to take over leadership of a kingdom from a ruler who isn't really doing anything wrong (until he gets brainwashed by the evil book, but that's later).
did you hit the bong before you wrote that? Wish was written by the big boss of WDAS, Jennifer Lee.
I wasn't alluding to her, I think she represents the attitude of current WDAS pretty well in her scripts. Since she took over all of the animated Disney movies have felt similarly "off". I was talking about corporate leadership, Bob Iger and previously Chapek. Disney and Pixar employees obviously feel they are fighting against something with the movies they are making.
ah. I thought you were alluding to John Lasseter.
I wasn't, but with Pixar specifically I think it's fair to say he's a reason for the change in their output. The studio has a new purpose now. I have mixed feelings on the state of Disney and Pixar. On the one hand I personally don't like their messages and focus on "telling messages" through their movies. They've become out of touch with what general audiences want to see, but also aren't telling interesting enough stories to feel like independent voices. Representation only works if there's an independent voice to go along with it. Why I don't mind Turning Red and Elemental as much as something like Wish or Lightyear that only resemble focus group approval.
On the other hand, regardless of what I feel of the quality of the films, they were blamed for all the failures of their corporate decisions. It's one thing for San Francisco liberal artists to complain about Ron Desantis, it's another thing entirely for a Fortune 500 CEO to constantly flip-flop between who they're pandering too because they have no idea what they're doing and resting on the laurels of IP for a decade meant they could run the studio on autopilot until now. Again, even if I don't like the output, all these people were told from the top-down that they were allowed to make in-your-face "woke" stories like Win Or Lose, only for them to be thrown into the Disney Vault because the optics have changed.
I just like talking about this shit. It's fun to speculate because things are finally starting to change and nobody has figured out the specifics yet. It's like I'm watching the fall of an empire from the relative safety of my computer screen.
sounds like you're pretty wishy washy yourself. I don't know if Disney will fail or not. I just like some of their movies. I ignore the stuff that has bad buzz, like Wish, Strange World, and Lightyear.
>sounds like you're pretty wishy washy yourself
Everybody's trying to figure out what's happening. People claiming to know the answer aren't honest with themselves. Not trying to win an argument, just offering my perspective. You can take it or leave it.
I think Turning Red and Elemental very much had agendas in the sense the filmmakers were trying to preach to the audience about certain injustices. The key difference is they ALSO have enough individuality in them so that I can confidentially point to the person wanting to tell the message. It's easier to swallow "my panda my choice" when I know Domme Shi is a first-generation immigrant who made a personal movie about her experiences. It cements the story in reality. Remove that and you're only left with an agenda. Imagine if Turning Red didn't have someone you could point to saying it's based on her childhood. It would be creepy and weird imo.
I think Zootopia was made with earnest intentions for the police and race angles. It started as "all animals live together" and they were forced to flesh out things for the narrative. It came pretty close to losing me with Judy's speech, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it was just storytelling laziness and they needed a reason for Judy to have a falling out with Nick and trust the twist villain. I'm worried they'll overthink everything for the sequel.
>It would be creepy and weird imo.
hmm kind of like those Ghibli movies about little girls?
Do you think though, that Turning Red and Elemental were agenda movies? What about Zootopia, made when Disney had all the goodwill in the world?
>Elemental is not that far removed from Romeo and Juliet, normal people recognize that without thinking it's race-mixing propaganda
I'm getting mixed signals about what a "normal" audience will or will not recognize. I don't believe they'd be aware that a chunk of the film comes from Peter Sohn venting out cultural issues, but neither would they recognize Wish for the behind-the-scenes studio drama. Nor would they see something like Lightyear as nothing but a soulless cash grab instead of some ideology-first film.
On paper, Wish has most of the Disney staples going for it (fantasy kingdom, plucky female protagonist, "cute" animal sidekick, magic and yearning) except for a working villain. For a 100th anniversary celebration film it's far less traditional and arguably closer to something like Moana and Encanto, but even those did well enough
Moana did wonderfully at the box office and is a staple of Disney Plus. And Encanto of course was a phenomenon in early 2022 when it deputed on Disney Plus Christmas 2021.
Exactly, so I'm trying to puzzle out the lack of interest for Wish when you can omit easy answers like the MC being brown, the conflict being non-traditional, or the brand being poisoned since Encanto was just a year prior
The idea of a general audience now being tuned to things like critic scores might do it, but it's a hard pill for me to swallow
Well I definitely think COVID has an overhang on the box office for family flicks. And Wish just wasn't that good. So it doesn't open well and word of mouth isn't good. Elemental had middling critical reviews like Lightyear did but it had capacity to expand because people didn't know the world of Elemental at first like they knew Lightyear at first.
Living in an era where films have to be good to do well is wild. I still remember BvS and Suicide Squad being among the highest grossing films of 2016
tbf BvS had one of the most disastrous second weekend drops of all time
I wouldn't go far enough to say movies have to be good to be successful, there are still plenty of exceptions on both sides. It does seem that entire franchises are being rejected though. Younger generations seem to spread word on when movies are "cringe" a lot better than millennials who cry when corporations are being criticized.
yeah 2016 was wild. Lots of surprise hits at the box office that year. Deadpool, Zootopia, Secret life of Pets
>This biggest factor is quality.
>is that families are unironically spooked by the woke stuff. It doesn't mean people are racist or sexist or whatever twitter losers like to throw around, it just means they don't want to waste their time being lectured when they're looking for entertainment.
>People can detect whether a movie has political lecturing as priority #1 vs. entertainment that happens to have a diverse cast.
Pic related was a high-quality film with next to no political agenda (unless you count "we should kill this malevolent AI demigod before the world's governments try to hijack it" as political but I don't think that's very controversial to anyone who's not a Silicon Valley techtard) with no pandering or lecturing or anything and it massively underperformed. It was outperformed in the US by Barbie, a VERY sociopolitically charged film, and Sound of Freedom, which owed its entire success to being swept up in a political shitstorm, with lefties dismissing or attacking it because they tacitly support pedophiles and rightoids buying multiple tickets and spreading theories on social media about theaters trying to suppress or sabotage the movie. It would be easier to argue that being free of divisive politics is WORSE for a film's box office at this point.
This anon is correct though
>Covid causing budgets to be inflated.
MI7 was one of the films hardest hit by this.
I think that movies have to aim for more niche audiences. Like Sound of Freedom aimed for the rightoid crowd that hates Hollywood. And Color Purple served black audiences but didn't catch on outside that segment despite a huge Christmas day
>the left does the bad things
>catholic church is right wing
take your meds
Well I was specifically talking about animated movies where parents will choose what they take their kids to see. Mission Impossible is still baffling to me. I agree with what you said. Barbenheimer stole the thunder next weekend, but even on its opening weekend MI underperformed. I guess it targeted boomers a lot more than people realized, and the "Part 1" scared them away because of the implied homework. It's just strange.
I'm down with this. It's what I want Hollywood to be. Make smaller movies that go all out for specific people. I think the narrative of "but big budgets mean better production value" has gone out the window when the most expensive super hero movies of the year all look like garbage and Godzilla Minus One looks better made for like $10 million.
How did that social anxiety crab movie do?
shut the frick up, Boco
the standard explanation is that family audiences are more reticent to return to the movie theaters.
I think that Elemental and Migration will prime the pump for more cartoons to enter the box office. But if Turning Red or Luca were also in theaters ir would have helped.
Audiences haven’t returned to pre-Covid viewing patterns while movies that came out this year were delayed by Covid causing budgets to be inflated.
Which budgets were inflated for which cartoons.
Go Woke, Go Broke
k. But there was a time Disney could make a movie like Zootopia which would make a billion worldwide.
They were bad but not in the way normalgays usually approve of
They were made for audiences that don't exist.
>animated movies
the boy and the heron did well
Eh it's still only going to end with $45 million domestic. Which is really great for an anime movie from Hayao Miyazaki but not so much for a Disney animated movie.
>domestic
yeah now compare international sales. boy and the heron made 100 million and wish made 126 million or something
the boy and the heron did better than wish
P.S.
did better in terms of production vs profit ratio. my point still stands, it was an animated movie that did well
Yeah I realize in its native Japan, The Boy and the Heron made a lot of money. But it was a disappointment compared to other Ghibli movies. Spirited Away made 30 billion yen, Princess Mononoke 19 billion yen, Wind Rises 12 billion yen and Heron made 8.6 billion yen