The esteemed Tom Sito regales us:
Dec 31, 1955 - Chuck Jone's 'One Froggy Evening' premieres.
Director Steven Spielberg called it the "Citizen Kane of Cartoons." If you wonder why you never heard the old time ditty 'The Michigan Rag' anywhere else but here, was because Chuck Jones & Mike Maltese wrote it specifically for the cartoon. For years no one was sure who the singing voice was. Its been suggested he was a local night club baritone named Bill Roberts.
So ... this:
Grosses from January 1 through Monday tallied $11,059,624,118 so far, and the box office was up 2.3% from a year earlier. ...
PG-rated movies made their mark in 2016 with Finding Dory ($486.29M), The Secret Life of Pets ($368.3M), The Jungle Book ($364M), Zootopia ($341.26M), Moana ($184M-$185M) and now Sing ($76.7M-$78M+) all contributing substantially to the year’s success, according to ComScore’s senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. ...
There is no evidence, none, that "too many animated features in the marketplace depress their box office".
It's like saying, "Too many live-action features depress the grosses of live-action features. Good movies produced on budgets that aren't insane will generally find their audience and turn a profit. And yeah, sometimes it takes a while, since revenue streams come from many sources.
But it's not true, and has never been true, that animated movies are a "genre". Westerns are a genre. World War II combat movies are a genre, but animated features are simply a style of presentation for a wide range of subject matter. Odd how many analysts and commentators don't get this.
Dec 26, 1939 - Over the holiday break, Walt Disney Animation moved from Hyperion to their new air-conditioned Burbank Studio lot. The buildings are designed like hospital wards, so in case he hit economic trouble, Disney could sell them to the planned St. Joseph's Hospital across the street. Animator Ward Kimball said it was the first time he worked in a studio where all the furniture matched. The old Hyperion Studio was bulldozed in 1966, the year of Walt Disney’s death.Camera was among the first department to travel to Burbank, after which other departments followed. Animator Don Lusk's future wife was the person in coordinating and choreographic the move from Hyperion to Buena Vista Street. Almost two years later, the soon-to-be Mrs. Lusk found out from Walt Disney that Don, one of the strikers in the 1941 job action at WDP, was on Walt's naughty list and destined for eventual layoff. That layoff took another twenty years to happen due to a World War and repeated interventions by Don's friend Eric Larson, but finally, after the completion of 101 Dalmations, Don was dismissed from Disney. There is, however, a happy ending. After his separation separation from the House of Mouse, Mr. Lusk spent twenty contented years at Hanna-Barbera, working as a director. Today he's the last of the pre-war Disney animators, age 103.
For the last ten years (at least), there has been pissing and moaning about how the cascade of animated features are "cannibalizing" one another.
Me, I don't want to even THINK about a Polynesian girl gnawing on a singing pig's leg, but there isn't a whole lot of evidence that animated features are destroying each other THIS holiday season.
Moana now sits in the middle of the Box Office Ten with $184 million in domestic grosses after sitting on top of it for the better part of a month.
Sing, the newest animated entrant, will likely end up with $74 million at the end of its initial weekend, coming in #2 to Disney's latest Star Wars juggernaut.
And let's not forget Trolls, now in domestic release for 52 days, has grossed $148,451,158.Grizzled old negotiators inside the entertainment business know what the term "pattern bargaining" means: the first labor organization into the new contract cycle gets to mark off the field for unions that follow. The Directors Guild of America, first union up in the new round of negotiations, has now done some marking:
Just in time for the holidays, the DGA and management’s AMPTP have reached an agreement on terms for a new three-year film and TV contract. Details of the deal aren’t being released until after it’s been seen by the guild’s national board. The two sides began talks on Dec. 5 and wrapped on the eve of Christmas Eve. The DGA’s current three-year contract runs through June 30, 2017, but the guild is famous for starting — and finishing — negotiations well in advance of the expiration of its major contracts. ...
Nobody knows what the new deal is, but breaths are no doubt bated all over town.
There is New Media, there are wage increases. There are pension benefits and health benefits and nobody yet knows (outside of hte bargaining parties) what the details are. New Media is going to be a BIG deal in every contract over the next two years.
Deadline informs us:
Wes Anderson surprised today with the announcement of the start of production on his next film, a stop-motion animated pic he’s calling Isle Of Dogs. ...
It looks to be another stop-motion production, as was Mr. Anderson's first, The Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Fox received solid reviews, but the pic's box office take was under-powered, taking in just $46 million. (Happily, the production cost came in at $40 million, but the theatrical take let The Fantastic Mr. Fox in the red).
Hopefully, Mr. Anderson will have better results with Isle of Dogs
