Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Cartoon Development

All the big animation players are displaying their wares at Annecy. Where else would they show them this time of year?

Coming off the success of its Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, [Sony Pictures Animation] announced that China’s Tencent has boarded Jackie Chan’s Wish Dragon, and also revealed three projects in development – a reimagining of The Boondocks, horror series Hungry Ghosts, based on the Dark Horse Graphic Novel by the late Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose, and comedy Superbago, a collabortion with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios – along with two new adult-skewing animated features from Genndy Tartakovsky. ...

There's more and more production of cartoons because:

A) The costs are low* and the profit margins are large.

B) Theatrical animation is, after super-heroes, the most profitable type of feature out there.

C) As streaming media becomes more ubiquitous, entertainment conglomerates have come to realize that animated content has to play a large role in what gets distributed because kids and adults both watch ... and kids in particular are a highly desirable market because they continue viewing habits with brands that plant their flag early (when children are 3-7).

Add On: And now the trades have noted this:

Disney stock rose 4.4% Thursday, setting a record high closing price of $141.74, after a Wall Street analyst boosted his price target for the company on increased optimism about the company’s streaming prospects.

Benjamin Swinburne of Morgan Stanley, in a note to clients, said he is now forecasting that Disney will reach more than 130 million global subscribers by 2024 across its three streaming services, Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu. The analyst sees Disney+, which launches in November, accounting for 70 million of the total. ...

Animation, of course, is a large part of why Disney's future streaming business is supposed to be (per analysts) to potent ... and so profitable.

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