Astro Boy

[Ben]

As far as I know, Astro Boy seems to be doing fairly well worldwide, and video sales will definitely come into account on a title like this. Someone may well buy them up and if so my money would be on WB, who could turn them into their own in-house CG studio.

If not, then it also looks like Tusker will die for a second time.

[EricJ]

That'd be too bad, but we do all know they were on shaky financial ground already. Gee, and I was looking forward to Gatchaman. Of course, if Astro Boy couldn't find an audience, imagine how Gatchaman would have fared.

The idea of doing an Astro movie at all dates back to the mid-90's, when studio suits and ties saying "We gotta get in on this 'Japanimation' thing the young kids are into!" resulted in pre-production on a live-action Speed Racer, Astro Boy, and Gigantor.
(We know what eventually happened to the other two ten years of development-heck later, but of the third, nothing remains but Sandra Bullock's virally-planted line in "Speed".)

If audiences haven't heard of the same 60's TV-afternoon characters that old-fogey studios immediately picture when someone mentions "anime", that's not our fault--
Kids were just too young to have the same severely-limited nostalgia, and although Imagi's movie looked pretty good (better than most third-parties, anyway, I was even hoping to see it!), the character had to bring his own game to the table.
(Also, it's October--How much money WERE they expecting to make with the kids in school?)

Still, the original was no classic of 60's proto-anime, and the slick new look actually made the characters look appealing.

[GeorgeC]

That'd be too bad, but we do all know they were on shaky financial ground already. Gee, and I was looking forward to Gatchaman. Of course, if Astro Boy couldn't find an audience, imagine how Gatchaman would have fared.

That's been a problem with older anime that I've noticed for close to 10 years now, Rand.

The problem is that when a TV series or theatrical shorts aren't shown anywhere for many years how is the general public supposed to get enthusiastic about new shorts and feature films???

(That's an argument I've made for the less-than-stellar sales of many WB and Disney classic animated product. Feature films do very well but re-releases of the theatrical shorts have not been stellar sellers in this home video era even though they were platinum sellers in the VHS era. That was probably because in the 1980s when they were released on VHS some of them were still being shown on TV, too! One dominant media, TV, does feed sales into the other.)

The original Gatchman and Astro Boy series have been released in the US on DVD. Both are still widely available on web-present stores and easy to get. Neither has exactly burned up the sales charts.

Cartoon Network did show Astro Boy for a while but even when they ran a marathon of the series the ratings just weren't there. The original B & W series is so old and the animation and audio are so bad that I think they drive away viewers unless they were sophisticated and mature enough to look past those deficiencies and see the charm of the characters and stories.

Gatchaman probably has less excuses for its cheap animation having been made a decade later but arguably had a greater impact on a generation of kids (including me) in the late 1970s in its "Battle of the Planets" incarnation. However, that English adaptation and the Japanese original have been MIA on TV for many years. How is any sizeable following supposed to develop when a show goes off the map for years?!?

To get Gatchaman back on the air in the US -- let alone the rights-lapsed "Battle of the Planets" version -- would take a major effort and leap of faith on the part of any company. ADV made a good run a few years back at a more faithful English-dubbed and subbed version of Gatchaman but again it failed in sales. Episodes of it were shown on the original (and since-deceased) 24-hour version of the Anime Channel but hardly anybody subscribed to that pay channel. New comics have also been produced of Gatchaman with cover art by Alex Ross but they still didn't generate enough interest to be published for many issues.

The faddish nature of anime fandom makes it impossible to figure what will be successful for many years and what will attract new fans as well as retain faithful older fans. To my knowledge, only Robotech and Voltron (Lion Force), two dubbed and heavily rewritten shows, have managed this. Other series have come and gone with very small cult followings that can't justify more than occasional once in every ten years re-releases of those series.

[EricJ]

Saw the film today and I thought it was pretty good. Not great, but a nice way to spend ninety minutes.

Same here: It's definitely trying hard for that Meet the Robinsons vibe, but that gives it a little more charm than a few of the more recently charmless third-parties (ahemmeatballs51)

So many third-party studios at least now have caught onto some comprehension of how to deliberately do a huggy Pixar imitation instead of a sitcom-spewing Dreamworks imitation, that we may have more CGI's where we LIKE the characters--
Again, the original Japanese version was no prize apart from its cult nostalgia, but the heavy Americanization made it a nice hybrid....If it'd been thoroughly US-synthesized (and there was a little of the "Robots" feel to it), it would've been forgettable, but it actually worked to see Tezuka characters redesigned as "normal"-looking 3-D CGI characters.

[ELIOLI]

Don't agree at all about your comment with *ehemmeatballs*..but it will never seem to be that we will agree on everything..or anything. but that's ok.

But I really enjoyed this movie.Nice characters,nice action scenes. Something I would buy on DVD. To bad not many people actually know who "Astro Boy" is. It had a nice mix of charm, and some older appeal. But people these days (or kids my age) think any animated movie is just for kids. I hope it does well later on in the BOX office.I actaully enjoyed it alot. pleasent surprise:) seems to be alot of good movies out this year.

hey Ben, can you give me the gross world wide if you please?

[Bill1978]

Out of curiosity is Astro Boy the cartoon series not very well known in the US. I'm from Australia and I remember watching the series in the 80s (the updated version) as a kid, my brothers and I loved it. All the US reviews for the movie talk about the cult status of the anime blah blah and if there is a market for the film, but here in Australia the reviews are about childhood nostaglia and imply that everyone knows who Astro Boy is. Many people I have mentioned Astro Boy to, ranging from my age group to younger age group get quite excited to hear there is an Astro Boy movie

[Ben]

Currently Astro Boy stands at #6 in the US with around $8.5m. It opened at number one in China with over $4.5m and is continuing to do well there. But it died in Japan with well under $1m, and has yet to open in other international territories such as the UK and Europe, so the "worldwide box office" isn't really a quantifiable figure yet. However, at around under $15m so far, it's not looking good against the $60m+ that has been spent.

[ELIOLI]

I really liked this movie, but can someone give me a good reason why this movie isn't doing as good. I mean, it's not like you had to learn the history behind Astro Boy just to watch it. Fan or no fan, you could understand the concept without the history or backstory. I just don't really get it. Did it had enough promotion? It would be such a shame if Imagi went down. They had greatness in them.

[Ben]

Some great movies (Wizard Of Oz, Citizen Kane, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Mystery Men...!) never found their audiences on original release. It just happens for one reason or another.

Sci-fi is a tough sale in mainstream animation, and you really need to go all out with the promotion to sell it to non-believers. And even then that's a task and a half. And here you're dealing with a small studio without the big promotional funds, and a property that could be perceived as either "old" or "not worth remaking". Indeed, long time fans could also be reacting against the film by not coming to see it.

[EricJ]

Out of curiosity is Astro Boy the cartoon series not very well known in the US. I'm from Australia and I remember watching the series in the 80s (the updated version) as a kid, my brothers and I loved it.

THe 60's B/W version played the US in the 60's, which is why a lot of old parents and studio executives remember it (think of Astro as the Japanese Mighty Mouse, that everyone remembers watching, but can't remember liking)--

Again, we only got the movie because the rush to capitalize on the Anime craze caused a lot of old-fogeys to stereotypically remember the 60's shows they grew up with--And the rush for any willing director to finally get said greenlit projects out of limbo, like they finally did with the Speed Racer movie.
(Which was also good and source-respectful and released at the wrong darn time.)

[Randall]

Here in Canada, I'm not sure how big the first (black and white) series was, though it did air here. I'm not old enough to have been around then, but I did watch the 1980s version often and liked it, though I wouldn't say it was a big hit. Eric's Mighty Mouse comparison is probably on the nose.

[estefan]

There's also the fact that Summit Entertainment barely promoted it. I only saw an advertisement prior to the Toy Story Double Feature...and that was it. I also didn't see any posters for Astro Boy until the day of release. To be honest, unless the word "Twilight" is in the film title, they're not going to give two hoots about it.

In fact, looking at the studio's brief history, their own successes are Twilight and the Nicholas Cage sci-fi flick Knowing from earlier this year. Everything else they have had a hand in distributing has either bombed or drastically under-performed. All because of lack of marketing.

However, there's also the whole deal that adaptations of anime series don't seem to fare well unless Pikachu is on the poster. Even Dragonball, which still has a fairly big audience today was a massive flop of epic proportions (in North America anyway, its success over-seas has led to a sequel being green-lit).

And I think the lack of 3-D might have to do with it. Every computer-animated film has done extremely well this year, all except for 9 and Astro Boy (neither of which were presented in 3-D, so they couldn't use that as a big selling point like Monsters vs Aliens, Up and Ice Age did).

[Randall]

3-D may have helped a bit, but it would have added more to the cost of the film, and ultimately it was just too under-promoted, in a year of lots of other animation winners from the big studios.

[EricJ]

However, there's also the whole deal that adaptations of anime series don't seem to fare well unless Pikachu is on the poster. Even Dragonball, which still has a fairly big audience today was a massive flop of epic proportions (in North America anyway, its success over-seas has led to a sequel being green-lit).

Actually, audiences would like an anime-adaptation series, if we could actually get one--
Just that Speed Racer's original release was squashed between Iron Man on one side and Indiana Jones on the other (and audiences bemused by the stylization of the trailer deciding to wait for the reviews, and bad press and teen reviews baffled by never having seen the old series)...
And Dragonball was perceived as sacrilegious by the fans and an unholy disaster by the non-fans, causing Fox to bury it in the spring without fanfare.

And throwing in Summit's non-promotion and kids-in-school release date for Astro, that makes it more of a baseball bad-luck streak than a "trend" about audiences...Do we have any other projects we can test the theory with?

[eddievalient]

Well, Leonardo Decaprio was going to produce "Akira" and James Cameron wanted to do "Battle Angel", but I think those have died quietly.