Bob's Longform Burger

There's another hand-drawn feature in our future ... yet another spin-off from a popular television series:

20th Century Fox said today that it is making a feature film based on the Fox animated series Bob’s Burgers and has set a July 17, 2020 release date. ...

“A Bob’s Burgers film fits perfectly with our initiative to redouble our family and animation efforts,” said Twentieth Century Fox Film chairman and CEO Stacey Snider. “We’re grateful to [Fox Television Group chairmen Gary Newman and Dana Walden] for trusting us with this beloved property and we’re so excited to be working with Loren and his team.” ...

As Disney mines its vaults, so 20th Century Fox mines the animation properties it has on hand. Execs over there no doubt took a look at the show's climbing ratings and Emmy visibility, and decided that a BB feature was a viable way to make money and keep the Bob's Burgers' brand robust and visible.

The question is, how big will the budget be? The Simpsons Movie came in at $75 million; I'm guessing that the money spent on this project will be less than that, tens of millions less. (Walt Disney Animation Studios delivered its Winnie the Pooh feature for $30 million. That would seem to be a realistic target for Bob's Burgers.)

And the other question: How much of the movie will be made at the Bento box studios in Burbank, North Hollywood, and Atlanta? Certainly lots of the pre-production, but maybe some of the animation as well, though it wouldn't surprise anybody if much of the animation and layouts were done overseas like the series. (The Simpsons Movie had storyboards, script, character designs, layouts and some key animation created in Southern California.)

Twenty-Five Years Ago Today*

Cartoon Network was born.

Media mogul Ted Turner (also known as "the mouth of the South"), had been accumulating Warners and M-G-M cartoons, and then went ahead and bought Hanna-Barbera, mostly for its library of TV shorts and half hours. He wanted to launch an all-cartoon cable network, but he needed animated content, and so went out and acquired LOTS of it.

But in the process, he also purchased a cartoon studio named Hanna-Barbera, and he needed an executive to run it. After asking around, Ted hired MTV's first creative director, and young go-getter named Fred Seibert. And Fred S. described to Animation World Network how he had some fresh idea about how to create new cartoon content:

“I arrive at Hanna-Barbera knowing I want to make a lot of short cartoons like the way Looney Tunes used to be done. I want to try lots and lots of talent. … I said we’ll make a short cartoon every week. … We’ll run the cartoon primetime Sunday evenings just before a cartoon movie, and every other week for two years … Lo and behold, Cartoon Network bought it.”

Siebert’s “new cartoon every week” proposal ended up being Hanna-Barbera’s “What a Cartoon!” incubator. (“Throw a lot of different short entertainments onto the TV screen, see which ones the public likes.”) Within twenty-four months, “WaC!” had created four dozen original shorts pitched by staff employees and outside artists. Pitches the studio liked were greenlit into shorts. And the shorts the viewing public liked were expanded into series: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory, David Feiss’ Cow and Chicken and I Am Weasel, and Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls (among others).

All this creative ferment became the nucleus for a new animation studio bearing the name of Ted Turner’s cable channel: Cartoon Network Studios, which today is a quarter century old.

* Unless my impeccable sources are wrong.

Weekend Box Office

One animated feature rides the Big List, with a couple of other cartoon movies still circulating in a handful of theaters.

FRIDAY-SUNDAY TICKET SALES

1/2/3) American Made (UNI), 3,024 theaters / $6.1M Fri. (includes $960K previews) 3-day cume: $16.55M /Wk 1

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (FOX), 4,038 theaters (+35) / $4.87M Fri. (-68%) 3-day cume: $16.5M (-58%)/Total: $66.2M/Wk 2

It (NL/WB), 3,917 theaters (-90) / $4.9M Fri. 3-day cume: $16.2M (-46%)/Total: $290.1M/Wk 4

4.) The Lego Ninjago Movie (WB), 4,047 theaters / $2.6M Fri. (-56%) /3-day cume: $11.6M (-43%)/Total: $35.1M/Wk 2

5.) Flatliners (SONY), 2,552 theaters / $2.1M Fri./ 3-day cume: $5.5M /Wk 1

6.) Battle of the Sexes (FSL), 1,213 theaters (+1,192) / $1.1M Fri. (+5918%) /3-day cume: $3.5M (+600%) /Total:$4M/Wk 2

7.) American Assassin (CBS/LG), 3,020 theaters (-134) / $935K Fri./3-day cume: $3.1M (-47%) /Total: $31.7M/Wk 3

8.) Home Again (OR), 2,370 theaters (-315) / $528K Fri. /3-day cume: $1.7M (-47%)/Total: $25.1M/Wk 4

9/10) mother! (PAR), 1,840 theaters (-528) / $437K Fri. 3-day cume: $1.36M (-59%)/Total: $16.2M/Wk 3

Til Death Due Us Part (IND), 550 theaters / $455k Fri./ 3-day cume: $1.3M /Wk 1

Cars 3 ($152,435,133 in domestic receipts so far) and Despicable Me 3 ($261,978,360 to date) continue to hang on by their fingernails, but their theatrical presences are now tiny.

The next top tier animated feature slated for release is Coco in November ...

... snd then Ferdinand in December.

Hollywood Salaries

If you're a working stiff in the entertainment business, then according to the Reporter you'll pull down something like this:

LIVE-ACTION MEDIAN WEEKLY RATES

Feature Director -- $20,000

Storyboard Artist* -- $2600-$2800

TV Staff Writer -- $4,000

Camera Operator -- $1833

Boom Operator -- $1800

And if you're in the Southern California animation industry, these are the median rates as of last year (a new wage survey is in process):

ANIMATED MEDIAN WEEKLY RATES -- 2016

Feature Director -- $3500

TV Director -- $2400

Timing Director -- $2000

Feature Staff Writer -- $3100

TV Staff Writer -- $2200

B.G. Painter -- $1950

TV Production Board Artist -- $2047

Storyboard artist -- $2236

Comparing live-action wages to animation wages tends to be like comparing apples to apricots. Market rates and contract rates are all over the map, and highs and lows can take wild swings. There's also "New Media" to contend with. This tend to pull down mid-level figures.

* Not listed in the linked article, but based on what I know of the live-action contract under the Art Directors Guild

Lacklustre Legos

So we've got the second movie in the Kingsman franchise at the top of the card deck, and the third iteration of the Lego series filling the third position.

THE WEEKEND BOX OFFICE TAKE

1.) Kingsman: The Golden Circle (FOX), 4,003 theaters / $15.2m Fri. (includes $3.4m previews) /3-day cume: $39M /Wk 1

2.) It (NL/WB), 4,007 theaters (-141) / $9.1M Fri. /3-day cume: $29.1M (-52%)/Total: $265.4M/Wk 3

3.) The Lego Ninjago Movie (WB), 4,047 theaters / $5.8M Fri. /3-day cume: $20.8M /Wk 1

4.) American Assassin (CBS/LG), 3,154 theaters / $1.86m Fri. (-68%) /3-day cume: $6.2M (-58%) /Total: $26.1M/Wk 2

5.) Home Again (OR), 2,685 theaters (-351) / $1M Fri. (-38%) /3-day cume: $3.4M (-33%)/Total: $22.4M/Wk 3

6.) mother! (PAR), 2,368 theaters / $1M Fri. (-67%) /3-day cume: $3.25M (-57%)/Total: $13.4M/Wk 2

7/8). Hitman’s Bodyguard (LG), 2.037 theaters (-1,235) / $513K Fri. / 3-day cume: $1.83M (-49%)/Total: $73.6M /Wk 6

Friend Request(ES), 2,569 theaters / $694K Fri. /3-day cume: $1.8M / Wk 1

9.) Stronger (RSA), 574 theaters/ $520K Fri./3-day cume: $1.58M /Wk 1

10.) Wind River (TWC), 1,431 theaters (-1,118) / $367K Fri. / 3-day cume: $1.2M (-53%)/Total: $31.6M/Wk 8

The Lego franchise seems to be showing diminished returns. Perhaps you can only go to the well so many times without delivering something fresh and different?

... What made The Lego Movie so delightful was how it transcended its corporate roots and felt surprising. What made that film surprising makes this feel too familiar. Herein lies the downside of pulling off a seemingly impossible trick: once you perform the same trick enough times, the surprise of its success wears off. ...

The Lego Movie excelled at being different, and more off-kilter, than other animated films. The Lego Ninjago Movie feels not just like its predecessors, but other studios’ family fare. The last thing any of these movies should feel is watered down.

Meantime, The Emojoi Movie is down in the teens of the box office list, with $84.4 million in the kitty.

Phallic!!

Apparently new mischief has occurred in Cartoonland.

... There is no way a phallic symbol should be able to make it into a kid’s cartoon series — but then came the Netflix original series Myah the Bee.

The show is an animated series based on a children’s book and it raised eyebrows in the past few days when a number of concerned parents spotted a penis drawing in one of the episodes. Despite Netflix removing the penis-bearing episode, receipts were kept as a number of parents took to social media to share their crude findings.

Dirty pictures have a long and storied tradition in the animation arts. I've been privileged to see dirty gag drawings of Virgil Partch and Ward Kimball from the long ago thirties and forties. I was able to freeze the frame of The Rescuers video and spy the Playboy playmate in the window of a New York skyscraper. I was the proud owner of a Little Mermaid VHS box with a palace tower shaped like an engorged male member.

In my (now completed) professional life, I oversaw a grievance against a large studio that accused a guild member of drawing breasts and penises into layout designs. The Animation Guild fought the good fight, but the company brought in three artists who testified that, yup, those curves and straight lines were indeed penises and breasts, because the artist himself had told them that's what they were.

(The guild lost the grievance.)

Add On: The producer of the penis Maya the Bee issues this heart-felt (but not really) apology:

“An absolutely inappropriate image has been discovered in a four-second fly-by scene in one episode of the total of 78 episodes of the series,” producer Studio 100 said in a statement released to media this morning. “The origin of this image obviously results from a very bad joke from one of the 150 artists working on the production.”

Come on, people! It was only ONE episode. Anybody can slip here and there. Netflix shouldn't hold this against Studio 100. Appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken, I'm sure.

Animated Box Office

There are multiple animated features in the marketplace (though some just barely), and several live-action/animated movies. Their domestic and worldwide totals as of yesterday:

CARTOON WEEKEND GROSSES -- DOMESTIC -- GLOBAL

Leap! (#8) -- $18,705,564 -- $102,615,533

Despicable Me 3 (#13) -- $261,094,650 -- $1,015,427,005

The Nut Job 2 (#18) -- $28,093,664 -- $38,978,799

Cars 3 (#26) -- $152,279,065 -- $357,326,296

Captain Underpants (#44) -- $73,814,428 -- $104,736,260

Boss Baby (#105) -- $174,979,567 -- $498,846,458

SEMI-CARTOON GROSSES -- DOMESTIC -- GLOBAL

Spider-man: Homecoming (#39) -- $330,245,988 -- $861,245,988

War For The Planet Of The Apes (#21) -- $145,861,747 -- $431,967,715

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (#50) -- $389,804,217 -- $863,405,082

A scan of the list shows why super hero flicks and animated features keep getting made, and then made some more. Spider-Man and Guardians weigh in north of $800 million; Despicable Me 3 has grossed over a billion and Boxx Baby has made half a billion.

Cartoons and semi-cartoons have high profit margins, which is what our fine, entertainment conglomerates are seeking. They're not in the business of content creation as a philanthropic exercise, after all. (And this coming weekend, Warner Bros. will blast The LEGO Ninjago Movie into the marketplace. Nobody worries about animated features cannibalizing each other anymore. (That's so 2008. ...)