Disney Analyst
Well-Known Member
Isn’t it still due for the UK also?
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Elemental (Pixar - June 2023)
- Thread starter DCBaker
- Start date
Isn’t it still due for the UK also?
Disney Irish
Premium Member
Yes, July 7th.
wtyy21
Well-Known Member
Elemental beats The Flash at International box office for the second weekend ($31.3M for Elemental versus $26.6M for The Flash).
variety.com
The film maybe gradually gets positive word-to-mouth from the International audience, benefited from A cinemascore (similar to TLM) granted for the film.
Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Knocks Down ‘The Flash’ on International Box Office Charts
"The Flash" continues to stumble at the box office, collecting $26.6 million from 78 international territories.
variety.com
The film maybe gradually gets positive word-to-mouth from the International audience, benefited from A cinemascore (similar to TLM) granted for the film.
Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
That’s not Pixar’s image problem. Pixar’s image problem is that viewers look at it and say, “original animation is for streaming.” Every animation studio is facing this issue, though it’s more noticeable with Pixar because of the heights it once reached.
Tha Realest
Well-Known Member
“At least we’re not WBD!” manifests againElemental beats The Flash at International box office for the second weekend ($31.3M for Elemental versus $26.6M for The Flash).
Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Knocks Down ‘The Flash’ on International Box Office Charts
"The Flash" continues to stumble at the box office, collecting $26.6 million from 78 international territories.
The film maybe gradually gets positive word-to-mouth from the International audience, benefited from A cinemascore (similar to TLM) granted for the film.
As far as the ballooning budget:
1. Being used to making huge BO receipts, the animation studios probably don't think about tightening their belts.
2. I would assume all the engineering work to advance the art of CGI is baked into the budget. Other studios can rely on using what's just state-of-the-art off-the-shelf CGI without spending tens of millions for engineering new water/ice/fire/hair/skin simulation.
1. Being used to making huge BO receipts, the animation studios probably don't think about tightening their belts.
2. I would assume all the engineering work to advance the art of CGI is baked into the budget. Other studios can rely on using what's just state-of-the-art off-the-shelf CGI without spending tens of millions for engineering new water/ice/fire/hair/skin simulation.
Variety's articles on the BO don't have separate articles for separate films. So, to post an article about one film's BO, one is forced to include the other films of the day.
Right a letter to Variety complaining of their whataboutism.
Cmdr_Crimson
Well-Known Member
This makes me wonder if Blue Sky Studios was still around..How would they had dealt with this under Disney would we have even more Ice Age, Robots and Rio films until the cows come home? Even the last direct to Disney+ film on Buck Wild was unfavorable to reviews and it was not even animated by Blue Sky.
Communicora
Premium Member
3. They are said to have good working conditions for their production teams.
To compare, there's this article about the Spider-Verse production.
‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’
Four animators say unsustainable working conditions are behind the success of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
www.vulture.com
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
Yeah, they were going the Disney direct-to-video route from the late 90's with their sequels. Look at Rio 2.
One can probably guess what a Robots 2 or Spies in Disguise 2 would have looked like on that chart.
Tha Realest
Well-Known Member
And yet! Pixar is about to become the sequel machine.
Disstevefan1
Well-Known Member
Look at that, they all made money! 3 and 4 made the most money!
MrPromey
Well-Known Member
As for #2, none of the major studios are using stock off-the-shelf stuff. Most (including Disney/Pixar) are using industry standard modeling and composite software like Maya and Nuke, among others, which offer APIs for deep levels or custom coding and they all have their own in-house render systems.
Pixar uses RenderMan (which they also lisence/sell), Disney studios uses Hyperion Renderer, Dreamworks uses MoonRay, Illumnation uses MGLR, etc.
The thing about Pixar is they usually go with a far less economical style of animation/rendering which requires a lot more work and hardware resources to pull off. A lot of their "breakthroughs" and innovations come from finding ways to produce that stuff more cheaply, not so they can make movies for less but so they can use more of that stuff in what they do.
I mean, look at Elemental. Most of the characters are translucent and/or lacking a solid form and nearly all are empirical to their environments. That kind of thing is super-expensive to pull off and it's basically every frame of the movie.
It seems obvious, a big part of the reason the Mario Movie was more expensive than other Illumination work is that they went heavier in that direction to make everything glow and sparkle a whole lot more than it does in most of their work.
They calculated that spending the bigger bucks to add more eye-candy to the movie would be worth it for that release because they'd been handed a gift of guaranteed success if they didn't whiff it and it looks like they made the right call to spend a little extra for that one.
The big difference with Pixar is they try to set the dial to 11 on animation and rendering for nearly every release*, even when the story-telling part may be lacking.
That ends up hurting them when something doesn't perform well.
Likewise, no matter how bad or lacking the story, Disney's animation is almost never in question in regards to the era it's released.
I know there were people that took issue with the color palette of Strange World, for instance (though there was a story reason for that) but I've never heard anyone complain that the animation/rendering looked bad or cheap.
*Luca feels like it might have been the closest thing to a "budget" release I can think of from Pixar. I loved that movie but to my eye, they made creative decisions with the rendering/animation to reduce costs, particularly in the above-water scenes. I mean, tell me how many individually animated strands of hair you see in that movie. Still beautiful, still Pixar but not at the same level as the visuals of say, Toy Story 4.
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MrPromey
Well-Known Member
There's a reason we call things "vanilla" to say they're bland or boring... and yet vanilla is one of the most popular flavors on earth.
5 had a noticeable drop in profit thanks to it not being liked in and of itself and because 3 & 4 weren't liked.
Cars 3 suffered at the BO even though it was better than Cars 2, but people were wary of Cars 3 because of Cars 2.
Same drop off for Pirates for the same reason.
Meanwhile, the Toy Story franchise keeps printing money.
Disstevefan1
Well-Known Member
Compared to DAS, Pixar has always been the sequel machine with about one third of its movies being sequels.
DAS rarely did sequels. After Frozen 2 and Ralph 2, the next four DAS animation features are originals.
I believe the franchise mania era we're entering is temporary. It's sole purpose is to get (almost) guaranteed winners in the theaters to break the reliance on D+ and to tighten the budget until D+ is profitable.
When Ant-Man underperformed, Iger was musing about whether we needed all these sequels.
Next quarterly call, he was hyping franchises as a cherished asset.
Toy Story 3 & 4 were billion dollar films and both made more than 1 & 2.
Avengers 3 & 4 were 2 billion dollar films.