TheOneVader said:
Polar Express costed $270 million to make, and it's grossed, what, $50 million? Someone's gettin' fired
Despite such big names as Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis and cutting-edge technology, the $170 million film is tanking.
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[size=-1]BY PATRICK GOLDSTEIN[/size]
[size=-1]Los Angeles Times[/size]
[size=-1]What went wrong? First off, special effects don't come cheaply -- and neither did the "Express" talent.[/size]
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When Hanks and Zemeckis took "Polar Express" to Universal Pictures, where there was a deal with Castle Rock Entertainment, the film's producers, the studio was unenthusiastic about making a movie for which the two men would get not only $40 million in salary but 35 percent of the first-dollar gross -- 20 percent to Hanks, 15 percent to Zemeckis.
The studio also was nervous about making such an expensive film with performance capture, a largely untested new technology that uses real actors whose facial and body movements become the template for digitized characters.
Even worse, the technology takes the star out of the movie. He may play six parts, but there's no Tom Hanks in the film. Not only is his face gone, but the performance capture somehow leaches his trademark charm and everyday humanity off the screen as well.
The technology also brings out the worst in Zemeckis. Earlier in his career, he made irresistibly airy, exuberant comedies, but his more recent films have been increasingly chilly and soulless, qualities that deaden "Polar Express" as much as its technology does.
Then the film's performance-capture technology turned out to be a bigger turnoff than Warners imagined. Children who saw the film's TV spots had trouble identifying with the characters, who appear not only remote and zombie-like, but oddly old-fashioned, as if they escaped from a Norman Rockwell etching.
The biggest cause for second-guessing has come from Warners' decision to release the film five days after "The Incredibles," which is sort of like a guy taking a girl out on a date right after she's spent the night with George Clooney. Pixar is a tough act to follow.
On the other hand, what was Warners to do? If you have a Christmas movie, you can't wait until Christmas to release it, because after the holiday your business drops off a cliff.
Warners could've waited until Thanksgiving weekend, but that would have given the film a shorter run and put it opposite another holiday film, "Christmas With the Kranks."
Is there a lesson to be learned here? Not really. No matter how poorly "Express" does, it will hardly be Warners' biggest flop, a distinction, at least recently, that belongs to "Looney Tunes," a would-be franchise financed entirely by the studio that showed up dead on arrival at almost the same time last year.
Hanks may be in a slump, but if he survived "Joe Versus the Volcano," he'll surely survive this.
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