Will Disney buy DWA? No! Universal did!

[Ben]

I doubt that 3 was ever off the table, but that it would have to be brought in a little under budget. The fact remains that in the US, the Dragons brand plays on TV as well, where as over here in the UK and in Europe it's more associated with pay TV channels and not so accessible, so it was potentially always going to do more business outside the domestic US.

3 is certainly part of the plan, but I'd still bet that the wish is that they make it with a budge on par with the second film and not push things much past that. I don't know if the TV show is set to run and run or come to a natural end, but by the time of the third film I'd think it might be prudent for there to have been a moratorium on Dragons content so that the film is a bit more unique.

I'm still interested in how the Penguins feature will factor...that's also on US TV but around the world is less a "prestige" show as Dragons and is featured, as with Kung Fu Panda, on even the basic cable and free-to-air networks in the UK and Europe, so I'm not sure that's going to be able to rely on international to make up any domestic shortcomings. If they're lucky, I think DWA is looking at Peabody-type returns on the Penguins feature...

[ShyViolet]

Yeah, I'm not too optimistic on Penguins...as cute as they are I keep remembering the groan I heard from someone in the theater when their trailer started. Sigh. Those poor guys might just be played out by now (like the whole Madagascar franchise)...it's not 2005 anymore that's for sure.

[ShyViolet]

Things not so great at DWA right now....

http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/ ... works.html

[Ben]

It's been known for a while that Snider has been leaving live-DWs for a while now, ironically for Fox where she will oversee DWA releases under her watch. Live-DWs is about to attempt to bounce back (again) but really that dream is over and Spielberg knows it, hence why he never really cut his Amblin loose.

DWA has a big pipeline of movies to come, so I can't see too many layoffs, though there will be some, of course, the big thing being the outsourcing of animation overseas, and the ongoing threat of their movies not doing too well. The hge problem DWA has right now is a lack of top flight product that *isn't* a franchise picture (or feels like one, as Home does right now).

DWA has painted itself into a corner of not only needing each film to be a hit, but that each film is now a "sure thing" franchise extension...the problem being that so much exposure has led to audience's franchise fatigue, much as with the not-so Amazing Spidey series. Unless they some chances, have three or four major successes (of the breakout social impacting likes of Shrek), I honestly can't see DWA being around in ten years, if that.

There's only so many flops that Fox will put up with, the sad thing being that if DWA goes up for sale, the big draw will actually be their Classic Media catalog, of which nothing has happened since they bought it. I wonder if Fox would cherry pick the best of DWA and meld it with Blue Sky...or maybe make DWA the new Fox Animation so they can have two animation revenue streams a year or prove they don't need Blue Sky...?

Interesting times ahead, but maybe proof that you just can't make big, huge studio animation without a real studio's deep pockets...

[ShyViolet]

Sad. I was really hoping DWA would break out of this slump and take chances on some original stuff ie
Rise of the Guardians (as flawed if brilliant as that film was). Guess its middling success as well as Peabody's write down was the deal breaker.

[EricJ]

Things not so great at DWA right now....
http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/ ... works.html

(Aw, c'mon, where's the "Everybody LOVES Dreamworks!" spinning we usually get on the TAG Blog?)

DWA has painted itself into a corner of not only needing each film to be a hit, but that each film is now a "sure thing" franchise extension...the problem being that so much exposure has led to audience's franchise fatigue, much as with the not-so Amazing Spidey series. Unless they some chances, have three or four major successes (of the breakout social impacting likes of Shrek), I honestly can't see DWA being around in ten years, if that.

"Breakout social impacting"? Let's be honest: Maybe the first Shrek WAS just a danged fluke/illusion sprung out of our misplaced-anger anti-Eisner hysteria of the day. (I mean, "They were picking on fairytales, which is a total slam at the Disney empire!", does that even sound rational to us today, thirteen years later?)
In today's terms, imagine if Frozen had been the first CGI musical out of the Lasseter-era gate for WDFA instead of Tangled, and the studio spent the next five years wondering why everything else didn't "live up to it", since the box office "proved" how immortal the movie must have been...Katzenberg gambled his entire studio on chasing a flash in the pan, and he's not the only miner-49'er in the ghost town.

There's only so many flops that Fox will put up with, the sad thing being that if DWA goes up for sale, the big draw will actually be their Classic Media catalog, of which nothing has happened since they bought it. I wonder if Fox would cherry pick the best of DWA and meld it with Blue Sky...or maybe make DWA the new Fox Animation so they can have two animation revenue streams a year or prove they don't need Blue Sky...?

Oh, but DWA promised we'd get a new Rocky & Bullwinkle short!
(A Classic Media owner with creative greed would've had every single Toho Godzilla movie on Blu-ray by May...I wonder if JK even looked at what else he owned in the deal, or was he so tunnel-visioned on what MP&S2 he could make for the "next franchise". This is not a creative thinker we're dealing with, people.)

As for Fox, you're right, they can take or leave DWA, since they've still got the European markets providing so much insurance for every single Ice Age sequel, one wonders why they even bother releasing them in the US anymore. Which subsidizes the rest of Blue Sky, still trying to make Horton happen again by finding that one last Dr. Seuss story they haven't done yet--Despite the fact that the pertinent part of "From the makers of Ice Age & Horton" have long since moved to Universal.
And as for the "new" BlueSky searching for their next franchise, I doubt Rio 3's happening anytime soon, foreign markets or not.

[Ben]

Sad. I was really hoping DWA would break out of this slump and take chances on some original stuff...

Well, I sadly think we've heard the last on Me And My Shadow, a film that could have been something really special and technically dazzling.

Now it's just going to be desperate Penguins, Pandas and Dragons movies (good as they may turn out to be) instead of the original, wide ranging and somewhat groundbreaking earlier DWA movies.

[ShyViolet]

Yeah JK threw away so much of DreamWorks' potential after about 2003 when he dumped 2d....not that he didn't have his reasons, but it was such a shame. If only he had stuck to DreamWorks' original template--making "Indiana Jones" and Pocahontas type films...DreamWorks might very well have been a real competitor alongside Pixar. Instead he sold out to make films like Madagascar and Shrek the nth.
He's so different from Disney JK, whom I don't think we're ever going to see again.

An interesting run-down of what's wrong with DWA right now. Warning: a bit of strong language. Basically stuff we've been saying, some good insights.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/ ... n-20140903

[Ben]

He's always been the same JK, Vi (the one that said Mary Poppins was one of Walt's worst ever films!), but he just had a lot of creative help. And a lot of that help - remember - went with him to DreamWorks, hence the early success.

But...well, now he's finding out what Michael Eisner was going through when that company reached a plateau under his leadership, and the ones that had made a difference had flown the coup. It happens all the time, roughly every twenty years: someone great at leadership comes in and stirs up all the creatives into a frenzy, and it's all great for a while.

Then that leader starts to believe their own hype and that they're the reason it's all going so great. The real creatives leave, and the leader starts to scramble to keep the momentum and success going. But they're great leaders, not great creatives, and so the spiral goes...

We saw it after Walt died, we saw it twenty years after that, and, interestingly, we're seeing it 22 years into DWA's run (though I'd argue that the rot started to set in between Aardman leaving and Puss In Boots. So, yeah, 20 is the "magic number"...maybe it is time for change at DWA, by way of a purchase/split and/or a management change. I know they keep switching execs, but maybe it's time for the head honcho to stop spreading himself so thin and start trusting in his creatives again...?

[ShyViolet]

I totally get what you're saying Ben...he has definitely spread himself too thin ( especially with all the tv shows, YouTube channels, and theme parks) and good stories need to be the focus again, the way they were at Disney. (After all, didn't he once say: "what we look for is a great story and great characters" during the pre-Jungle Book previews? ). Yeah there is definitely a turnover trend at DWA now...although from what I understand both Brenda Chapman and James Baxter have returned. Sure, JK is basically who he was at Disney from a financial standpoint but not from a leadership standpoint, as you said. He doesn't trust the animators like he did then, or even his own creative side (which I always believed he had despite being an exec. He threw it all away not just in 2003 but in 2005 and 2006 when, as you said, Wallace and Gromit came out. He was too busy thinking about what "the audience" wants, and not the art of it...hence him wanting to give W & G American voices. (Shudder)

I absolutely loved seeing him speak at Cornell...he made a lot of good points on a lot of things...but during the Shrek the Third preview there was mostly silence. The beginning of the end, I guess, even with all the money STT made. Flushed Away (which was set to open just that Friday) was an anomaly...like Chicken Run...a successful DreamWorks Aardman pairing before he got scared that they couldn't best Disney or Pixar with it.

Yeah he's basically the same guy he was at Disney but if you look at profiles of him written in the80s and early 90s verses his later DreamWorks profiles he's just so different...less innocent maybe, much more of a "confident salesman" as you once said, Ben.

Nicole Laporte wrote in her book The Men Who Would be King that JK should have appointed a creative like John Lassetter to run DW animation from the very beginning. I don't totally agree with this but I don't know...judging from the latest DWA films, maybe it's not such a bad idea...

(Funny about Mary Poppins...I totally don't know if this is true or not but I think I read a long time ago on the Brew that he was once on a talk show with an animator and Mary Poppins came up...JK said he liked the technical wizardry and the animator put in that the film had a "metaphysical" quality to it as well, and JK said something like "you're really stupid!" I have absolutely no idea if this is true or not but it came to mind when you mentioned Mary Poppins. )

[EricJ]

Then that leader starts to believe their own hype and that they're the reason it's all going so great. The real creatives leave, and the leader starts to scramble to keep the momentum and success going. But they're great leaders, not great creatives, and so the spiral goes...

Considering one of the reasons Spielberg wanted Katzenberg so badly in the mid 90's was JK spreading his own hype that "Lion King? Yeah, that was my idea, pretty much... "--Forcing him into the position of having to live up to the "reputation" in his own mind, and try and up his own 90's-Renaissance Melodrama act with El Dorado, Sinbad and Spirit.
And then, of course, blaming the industry when that didn't take.

(though I'd argue that the rot started to set in between Aardman leaving and Puss In Boots.

I would historically say the Rot set in sometime during the success of Shrek 2, when the female audience that was championing Fiona suddenly convinced DWA that the Shrek series was the princess-bashing "feminist avenger" of un-PC fairytales, that they had their own built-in cheering-section audience that would boost them up against their rivals, and that it was their duty to "socially impact" us with a six-film series.
And when they didn't get it (after the Third test screening was an infamous disaster), they went looking for other six-film franchises to take its place.
That would be around the time JK forgot how studios make One Film, with story and characters and directors in it.

And this may be going off on a wide tangent here, but don't worry, I'm bringing it back, since it does underline why The Other Studios just aren't getting that love that the Lasseter-produced Pixar and WDFA's are getting:
---
There was a featurette on the Up disk (you know, the "Who'd watch an old guy?" movie that got the Best Picture nomination?), about how animator Pete Sohn created the character of good-scout Russell--
He describes going through a dozen different ideas--would Russell be the littlest of his troop, would he be a hip skinny smartass?--before just settling on old images of himself at eleven.
As he describes the story, both main characters have a "hole in their heart they need to fill"--Carl believes getting to the falls will bring Ellie back, and Russell believes getting his last badge will bring his dad back...And as Sohn points out, look where the missing badge is on Russell's sash.
---

Okay, now, here's the thing: Imagine if another studio had made the movie.
If it'd been an Illumination/old-BlueSky movie, for example, Russell would have been a happy lunatic, gently disturbing all and sundry with his optimistically out-there dreams of good-scouting...Which means they would have had to bring in a third character, a moody wisecracking time-bomb teen, and he would get the father-issue subplot.
And if Up had been a DWA movie? Oh, that's easy: Russell would have been the nerdy laughed-at failure of his troop, and his dreams of getting the last badge would be to "prove himself" and not be picked on anymore.

It's kind of no surprise that JK hated Mary Poppins, since the appeal of that movie was the nuances of character that Van Dyke, Andrews, Tomlinson and the kids brought to the book characters.
As it is, one of the reasons DWA doesn't seem to be finding that magic hold with the mass audiences that the more successful films do, is that little problem of having a hole where its heart should be. And he doesn't seem to notice it needs anything to fill it.

[Randall]

Quote found in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, coming from a studio exec that used to work with him, IIRC: "JK is not a creative person." He was described, rather, as someone who wanted to package product. And that's when he was with Paramount, oh so long ago.

So there ya go.

[Ben]

Now, now...you're just dropping quotes from a book I told you to read. Ahh, look at my little buddy...all grown up and sprouting real Hollywood insider stories!

[Randall]

Well, hey, it was a great book! Essential reading for the 1960s-1980s movie fan.

And I'm going to let that "little buddy" remark slide, youngster, only because you're a foot taller than me.

[Ben]