Disney finds fresh is best
The studio's modest summer movie offerings have eclipsed mega-budget, mega-hyped sequels.
By Jeff Oliver | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted July 20, 2003
The clown fish with the crippled fin has drop-kicked this summer's hyper-powered sequels, and the pirates are running off with the booty.
The story of this sequel-squished season will be about how Nemo beat the Matrix's Neo, how an amusement-park attraction coasted past franchise films, and what a difference a year and Pixar can make for Walt Disney Pictures.
Partway through this critical cinema season, Disney's summer movies -- The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl -- have grossed more than $430 million.
The number is, as yet, short of the $468 million Disney took in last summer. However, with the live-action Pirates only two weeks off the dock, Nemo still making more than $15 million a week and Freaky Friday -- a remake of the 1977 Disney classic -- set for release in August, the box-office prospects have Disney dreaming of a Hollywood ending to a surprisingly successful summer.
Disney will almost certainly beat its 2002 summer film gross, and it will do it with only four films. Last summer Disney released six films, including ESPN's Ultimate X, a minor release.
"Yeah, it was kind of a lackluster summer last year," Nina Jacobson, president of Buena Vista Motion Picture Group, said last week from her offices in Burbank, Calif. "It was pretty underwhelming."
She's putting it lightly. Of Disney's five major motion pictures in summer 2002, three of them -- The Country Bears, Reign of Fire and Bad Company -- together lost $160 million at the domestic box office, according to industry analysts.
Profits from Signs and Lilo & Stitch just managed to fill the hole, but that little bit of good news evaporated a few months later when the $180 million Treasure Planet flopped at the box office.
Times have changed, but Jacobson's understatement has not. Asked how summer 2003 is going, she said: "Yeah, you know what -- so far so good."
The fact is the story at the box office this summer really couldn't be much better for Disney. The company has proved that fresh is best in a market saturated with sequels.
Nemo, at $296 million, recently replaced The Matrix: Reloaded as the year's top grosser. And after its first week, Pirates is quickly leaving follow-ups such as Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in its wake.
"I can't say I'm surprised," said Josh Spector, film reporter for The Hollywood Reporter, a daily magazine devoted to the entertainment industry.
Indeed, Pixar, the studio behind Nemo and other successes such as A Bug's Life and Toy Story, is about the safest bet in Hollywood these days. In less then a decade, the company has produced four of the five top-grossing computer-animated movies of all time -- a list Nemo now leads.
Pirates, on the other hand, was more of a gamble. The movie, as many naysayers were more then happy to point out, was based on a popular Disney ride. It cost $140 million to make, and as Spector says, it looked like the type of film that "would have been easy to do badly."
Jacobson said she never understood the concern about the movie's source of inspiration. "I find some inexplicable snobbery in it," she says. "People don't feel any problem basing a movie on a TV show or on a comic-book figure. I don't see how a ride created by Walt Disney, one of the creative geniuses of our time, is any less rich a jumping-off point."
For Disney the importance of a strong performance at the box office could have more to do with image then money. "A lot of focus is put on the film division, but it's a very small portion of the whole company," said Paul Kim, senior media analyst for Kim & Co., an investment research firm in New York.
He says Disney's film division accounts for only 5 percent to 10 percent of its operating profits while the theme parks and the cable sports channel ESPN each account for about one-third of the company's profits.
Still, movies and their characters represent the first and most memorable face for Disney, and it is difficult to estimate how much they influence the company's overall prosperity. "It has the most impact on people's minds," Kim says. Both outside and inside Disney, movies are perceived as "what drives the whole business," he said.
One very important aspect of the success of Nemo is the emphasis it places on the relationship between Pixar and Disney. It was 1991 when Disney struck a deal with the computer-animation studio. Pixar and Disney split production and marketing costs, as well as profits. In 1991, Pixar was a small studio doing something new and unproven. Back then, Pixar needed Disney.
Now that Pixar has remade the animation industry after its own image, the studio has essentially become the student that surpassed the master. Today, Disney needs Pixar. And while Pixar is wedded to Disney for at least two more films, according to the contract, the studio can now begin discussing future possibilities with other companies, even though the current contract doesn't run out until November 2005.
"Pixar can walk to another studio after two more films. How is Disney going to deal with that when a third to half its profits come from Pixar?" Kim said.
Nemo's success places Pixar in a stronger position, especially considering the poor showing of some of Disney's recent in-house animation productions, he said. "Disney's is the same old, tired formula -- love story and then there's a lot of singing and it's kind of corny. It really hasn't worked for quite a while."
The ever-evident paradox of the motion-picture business -- the fact that high-schoolers and preteens seem to know better then Ivy League studio executives which movies are worth spending money on -- has perhaps never been more apparent than this summer, when studios spent heavily on highly hyped yet ultimately underachieving sequels.
"They're going to have to pay a bit more attention to what film franchises they're going to exploit," said Wade Holden, a movie analyst for Kagan World Media.
"Sequels are not the enemy. Boredom is the enemy," Disney's Jacobson said. "People are actually making the same movie twice; they're just spending twice the amount so you're just seeing more of it. I don't think that's a particularly exciting prospect for audiences."
If other studios have something to learn from Disney's success this summer, Jacobson said, it is the art of understatement. "I think the company did a very good job of letting the movies speak for themselves. They didn't pound their chests and say, 'You guys are going to love these movies.' " She says overmarketing causes audiences to suffer from "event fatigue."
Box-office numbers support the theory. After two weekends T3, for example, grossed a disappointing $118 million. Warner Brothers invested $200 million in making the film and another $40 million in promoting it. After three weeks Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, has made only $85.5 million on a $160 million investment by Sony.
The most convincing evidence that studios have overhyped many of this season's most anticipated releases is the stunning drops in attendance after opening-weekend blitzes. Second-weekend T3 ticket sales dropped 58 percent. Second-weekend attendance at The Hulk fell almost 70 percent.
"A lot of it has to do with the hype, and people get their expectations so overwrought. The publicity and marketing is so kind of grandiose," Jacobson said. "I think that everybody is having to realize that you can't tell people to love your movie -- you can only try your best to make a movie they'll love."
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BTW- I saw Pirates yesterday. It was wicked awesome. :sohappy: By far the best non-aminated disney film and up their on my list of favorite film. I say second after The Patriot. It could become my number one very soon when the DVD comes out this Christmas? But anyway, what the hell where some critics thinking when they bashed it? Come on, Enterainment Weekly, speak up.
So yeah, about the movie, some ride sceens but not that many so the movies would crash and burn. Great storyline. Johnny Depp was wicked good so was Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. I wouldn't mind Disney updating WDW Pirates Ride with the movie while still keeping the old. I had to ______ during the middle of the movie but i didn't want to get up to miss anything so I didn't stay through the credits because I had to go. Only movie ever that have have watched that had action throughout and laughs through the whole movie. The theater was packed. Laughing at all the right parts. I want to go again even though it cost 9 and a quarter to get in the movie. I forgot this part, but I credit Jerry Bruckheimer for his director, the top director in my mind and for Disney and the Cast/Crew for being politcal incorrect.
The previews, a million of them, but anyway, the Haunted Manison looked good. SPOILER ALERT WHICH YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW: the ballroom scene! Freaky Freaky looks funny but I wouldn't pay to see it. And (drum roll please) BROTHER BEAR looks amazing. Someone in the theater and I agree with them that it looks like the Lion King but only different animals. :lol: But it looks like it's going to be a monster hit. The previews got alots of laughs.
The studio's modest summer movie offerings have eclipsed mega-budget, mega-hyped sequels.
By Jeff Oliver | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted July 20, 2003
The clown fish with the crippled fin has drop-kicked this summer's hyper-powered sequels, and the pirates are running off with the booty.
The story of this sequel-squished season will be about how Nemo beat the Matrix's Neo, how an amusement-park attraction coasted past franchise films, and what a difference a year and Pixar can make for Walt Disney Pictures.
Partway through this critical cinema season, Disney's summer movies -- The Lizzie McGuire Movie, Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl -- have grossed more than $430 million.
The number is, as yet, short of the $468 million Disney took in last summer. However, with the live-action Pirates only two weeks off the dock, Nemo still making more than $15 million a week and Freaky Friday -- a remake of the 1977 Disney classic -- set for release in August, the box-office prospects have Disney dreaming of a Hollywood ending to a surprisingly successful summer.
Disney will almost certainly beat its 2002 summer film gross, and it will do it with only four films. Last summer Disney released six films, including ESPN's Ultimate X, a minor release.
"Yeah, it was kind of a lackluster summer last year," Nina Jacobson, president of Buena Vista Motion Picture Group, said last week from her offices in Burbank, Calif. "It was pretty underwhelming."
She's putting it lightly. Of Disney's five major motion pictures in summer 2002, three of them -- The Country Bears, Reign of Fire and Bad Company -- together lost $160 million at the domestic box office, according to industry analysts.
Profits from Signs and Lilo & Stitch just managed to fill the hole, but that little bit of good news evaporated a few months later when the $180 million Treasure Planet flopped at the box office.
Times have changed, but Jacobson's understatement has not. Asked how summer 2003 is going, she said: "Yeah, you know what -- so far so good."
The fact is the story at the box office this summer really couldn't be much better for Disney. The company has proved that fresh is best in a market saturated with sequels.
Nemo, at $296 million, recently replaced The Matrix: Reloaded as the year's top grosser. And after its first week, Pirates is quickly leaving follow-ups such as Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in its wake.
"I can't say I'm surprised," said Josh Spector, film reporter for The Hollywood Reporter, a daily magazine devoted to the entertainment industry.
Indeed, Pixar, the studio behind Nemo and other successes such as A Bug's Life and Toy Story, is about the safest bet in Hollywood these days. In less then a decade, the company has produced four of the five top-grossing computer-animated movies of all time -- a list Nemo now leads.
Pirates, on the other hand, was more of a gamble. The movie, as many naysayers were more then happy to point out, was based on a popular Disney ride. It cost $140 million to make, and as Spector says, it looked like the type of film that "would have been easy to do badly."
Jacobson said she never understood the concern about the movie's source of inspiration. "I find some inexplicable snobbery in it," she says. "People don't feel any problem basing a movie on a TV show or on a comic-book figure. I don't see how a ride created by Walt Disney, one of the creative geniuses of our time, is any less rich a jumping-off point."
For Disney the importance of a strong performance at the box office could have more to do with image then money. "A lot of focus is put on the film division, but it's a very small portion of the whole company," said Paul Kim, senior media analyst for Kim & Co., an investment research firm in New York.
He says Disney's film division accounts for only 5 percent to 10 percent of its operating profits while the theme parks and the cable sports channel ESPN each account for about one-third of the company's profits.
Still, movies and their characters represent the first and most memorable face for Disney, and it is difficult to estimate how much they influence the company's overall prosperity. "It has the most impact on people's minds," Kim says. Both outside and inside Disney, movies are perceived as "what drives the whole business," he said.
One very important aspect of the success of Nemo is the emphasis it places on the relationship between Pixar and Disney. It was 1991 when Disney struck a deal with the computer-animation studio. Pixar and Disney split production and marketing costs, as well as profits. In 1991, Pixar was a small studio doing something new and unproven. Back then, Pixar needed Disney.
Now that Pixar has remade the animation industry after its own image, the studio has essentially become the student that surpassed the master. Today, Disney needs Pixar. And while Pixar is wedded to Disney for at least two more films, according to the contract, the studio can now begin discussing future possibilities with other companies, even though the current contract doesn't run out until November 2005.
"Pixar can walk to another studio after two more films. How is Disney going to deal with that when a third to half its profits come from Pixar?" Kim said.
Nemo's success places Pixar in a stronger position, especially considering the poor showing of some of Disney's recent in-house animation productions, he said. "Disney's is the same old, tired formula -- love story and then there's a lot of singing and it's kind of corny. It really hasn't worked for quite a while."
The ever-evident paradox of the motion-picture business -- the fact that high-schoolers and preteens seem to know better then Ivy League studio executives which movies are worth spending money on -- has perhaps never been more apparent than this summer, when studios spent heavily on highly hyped yet ultimately underachieving sequels.
"They're going to have to pay a bit more attention to what film franchises they're going to exploit," said Wade Holden, a movie analyst for Kagan World Media.
"Sequels are not the enemy. Boredom is the enemy," Disney's Jacobson said. "People are actually making the same movie twice; they're just spending twice the amount so you're just seeing more of it. I don't think that's a particularly exciting prospect for audiences."
If other studios have something to learn from Disney's success this summer, Jacobson said, it is the art of understatement. "I think the company did a very good job of letting the movies speak for themselves. They didn't pound their chests and say, 'You guys are going to love these movies.' " She says overmarketing causes audiences to suffer from "event fatigue."
Box-office numbers support the theory. After two weekends T3, for example, grossed a disappointing $118 million. Warner Brothers invested $200 million in making the film and another $40 million in promoting it. After three weeks Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, has made only $85.5 million on a $160 million investment by Sony.
The most convincing evidence that studios have overhyped many of this season's most anticipated releases is the stunning drops in attendance after opening-weekend blitzes. Second-weekend T3 ticket sales dropped 58 percent. Second-weekend attendance at The Hulk fell almost 70 percent.
"A lot of it has to do with the hype, and people get their expectations so overwrought. The publicity and marketing is so kind of grandiose," Jacobson said. "I think that everybody is having to realize that you can't tell people to love your movie -- you can only try your best to make a movie they'll love."
-----------------------------------------
BTW- I saw Pirates yesterday. It was wicked awesome. :sohappy: By far the best non-aminated disney film and up their on my list of favorite film. I say second after The Patriot. It could become my number one very soon when the DVD comes out this Christmas? But anyway, what the hell where some critics thinking when they bashed it? Come on, Enterainment Weekly, speak up.
So yeah, about the movie, some ride sceens but not that many so the movies would crash and burn. Great storyline. Johnny Depp was wicked good so was Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. I wouldn't mind Disney updating WDW Pirates Ride with the movie while still keeping the old. I had to ______ during the middle of the movie but i didn't want to get up to miss anything so I didn't stay through the credits because I had to go. Only movie ever that have have watched that had action throughout and laughs through the whole movie. The theater was packed. Laughing at all the right parts. I want to go again even though it cost 9 and a quarter to get in the movie. I forgot this part, but I credit Jerry Bruckheimer for his director, the top director in my mind and for Disney and the Cast/Crew for being politcal incorrect.
The previews, a million of them, but anyway, the Haunted Manison looked good. SPOILER ALERT WHICH YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW: the ballroom scene! Freaky Freaky looks funny but I wouldn't pay to see it. And (drum roll please) BROTHER BEAR looks amazing. Someone in the theater and I agree with them that it looks like the Lion King but only different animals. :lol: But it looks like it's going to be a monster hit. The previews got alots of laughs.
