Two sides to Meet the Robinsons' numbers
Meet the Robinsons made around $25 million this weekend.
I guess that's good for Disney, inasmuch as the studio's feature animation department has produced 19 other non-Pixar cartoons over the past 20 years, and only five of them have had better opening weekends -- said films being Chicken Little (2005; $40 million), Lilo & Stitch (2002; $35.3 million), Tarzan (1999; $34.2 million), Pocahontas (1995; $29.5 million) and The Lion King (1994; $40.9 million). We can bump that number up to six if we count the partly live-action Dinosaur (2000; $38.9 million).
But as far as CGI cartoons go, it's still a smaller opening weekend than any of the 16 films produced by Pixar, Fox / Blue Sky, or Dreamworks / PDI have ever had, with the single solitary exception of Antz (1998; $17.2 million). On the other hand, it is easily bigger than the opening weekends for Flushed Away (2006; $18.8 million), which Aardman made for DreamWorks, and Everyone's Hero (2006; $6.1 million), which IDT made for Fox.
If we toss all the computer-animated films distributed by Warner Brothers into the mix, Meet the Robinsons is also well behind Happy Feet (2006; $41.5 million), but well ahead of The Ant Bully (2006; $8.4 million) and slightly ahead of TMNT (2007; $24.3 million) and The Polar Express (2004; $23.3 million) -- though I don't expect it to have the latter film's staying power.
It also did slightly better than the Sony films Open Season (2006; $23.6 million) and Monster House (2006; $22.2 million).
And it easily beat Paramount's Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001; $13.8 million) and Barnyard: The Original Party Animals (2006; $15.8 million), as well as everything put out by the Weinsteins, whose champ to date is Hoodwinked! (2005; $12.4 million).
So ... that's the level Disney is operating on these days.
APR 2 UPDATE: Jim Hill gives his two bits on the box-office figures and what they might mean for the future of Disney animation.
posted by Peter T Chattaway at 11:33 PM
2 Comments:
Disney has over commiittee'd itself. The stuff they produce now adays is just terrible. Only sometimes does a good film ever come from them anymore, and that's when they allow an artist with a vision to just do his thing. But the only time that happens is when said artist has a bit of clout. The "nobody artists" get subjected to the committee process, and then there's nothing left of the creative spark when that process is done.
As for "The Robinson's" the trailers were among the most uninspiring I've seen in years for any cartoon. There was no incentive at all to see this picture.
Totally agreed about the trailers.
As for the artist-vs.-committee stuff, I am curious to know exactly what parts of this film are the result of John Lasseter's intervention and what parts were there all along. Rumour has it that he required "radical surgery" to the film when he took over Walt Disney's animation department last year, but a year isn't remotely long enough to make a good movie from scratch -- or, for that matter, to impose an artistic vision where the film didn't have one before.
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