Will Disney buy DWA? No! Universal did!

[ShyViolet]

Some more bitter pills:

TAG is predicting that long-term contracts and guaranteed future employment will most likely be a thing of the past in the new business model. Now it's much more likely that they will adapt "hiring" for a specific project and then being let go after...(the way Disney and VFX houses do.)

It's so, so sad.

http://animationguildblog.blogspot.com/ ... g.html?m=1

[Ben]

...and could have been avoided. Ironically, JK ended up doing exactly what Eisner did at Disney, while not looking at the bigger picture. Nearly two years after acquiring Classic Media, where are those characters?

Buying that and Felix up was a way to give DWA an instant history of classic animation, but they haven't done anything with them yet! At the least, where are the old shorts and shows on home video? It's the same with DWA's own core characters - they just had a twenty year anniversary and yet we can't even buy all their films on Blu-ray Disc?

And now Dragon 3 has been pushed back nearly a year? The one film that is a likely a sure fire thing? They push that back to when enough time might have just passed so that audiences won't be bothered about it by the time it rolls by (or they saturate TV with the first two and the series to keep interest going, when really it's just eroding away at the audience for the third film)...?

DreamWorks Animation is not a very well run company...!

[Ben]

And now someone else (and more qualified than me!) has called it: could DWA actually be insolvent by 2019?

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/d ... ing-766174


And still no one is putting any stock into all their owned characters from the DreamWorks or Entertainment Rights/Classic Media libraries. So much - so much! - potential here...!

[ShyViolet]

This is terrible. So true about the Eisner comparison Ben...for two years it's been all about "brand" and "broadening appeal" but by now where IS the appeal??

Home might as well call itself "Home on the range". (And probably not even as good as that. )

[GeorgeC]

...and could have been avoided. Ironically, JK ended up doing exactly what Eisner did at Disney, while not looking at the bigger picture. Nearly two years after acquiring Classic Media, where are those characters?

Every one of the major studio/production companies has classic animated characters that they own that they're not doing anything with!

Granted, a bunch of these characters have only been last seen thirty-some years ago on television and have been out of the public eye since for decades in many cases... It's kind of hard sometimes to get people interested in things that they have absolutely no knowledge of or can't get easy access to old films to watch and learn about. I certainly don't like spending money on things sight unseen, either!

I dunno... Who is running these companies? People looking to make money, yeah, but do they even like what they're doing or care to make good films? I know it's not enough to be an animation geek to make a successful film -- you have to have other skills besides the knowledge of an encyclopedia like being able to tell stories or market films -- but do they even understand what their companies own and how unique some of these characters are? Some of the reasons I don't watch a lot of films in theaters now are that everything looks the same or has the same story, or I can even tell from the trailer that a film's going to be lousy! There are plenty of existing properties that aren't superheroes or long-running sci-fi series...

[Ben]

Yeah...but only one company has bought a bunch of classic characters in the last couple of years and has failed to do anything with them...

[ShyViolet]

JK plans on becoming more involved in the filmmaking process while giving freedom to Soria and Arnold:

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/cutba ... 201412230/

[GeorgeC]

Yeah...but only one company has bought a bunch of classic characters in the last couple of years and has failed to do anything with them...

I'll have to disagree with you there...

There are plenty of characters that Warner Bros owns even within the DC Superheroes Universe that they are not using right now let alone treating well! Some of these were classics that rivalled outsold even Superman in his prime during the 1940s!

Short list of characters that a person with decent imagination and good film sense could probably make a good film from -- Plastic Man, Captain Marvel (the original-- he is NOT called "Shazam" except for by ignorant people who don't read anything; the current revamp is awful), and the Blackhawks (one of the original special forces teams)... There are others but those are the ones that jump out at me right now. I'd put Wonder Woman on the list except for the fact that nobody in charge at WB or DC Comics really understands that character. She's been one thing or another for 25 years and it's been a big mess that there's very little common ground within that period to agree upon. (Honestly, I'd ignore most of what's happened with the character before 1987 and go back to what defined the character in the 1940s and 1950s aside from the weirder bondage stuff.) The fact that the character's origin was recently changed after fifty-some years should be a big clue that the people that control the character don't know what to do with her. That's a shame because the character is well-known internationally and it'd be very obvious that you would want to look at what made the 1970s TV series so popular (aside from the charismatic Lynda Carter and the swim wear she wore) and figure out what could be taken from that as well as the early comics. Well, they haven't figured out Superman aside from some of the animated projects since 1981 so it's not like the WW character is an isolated case, either!

(Except for a few animated films in the last 10 years, there hasn't been a really good live-action Superman film that was anything like the character I grew up with since 1981... The ultra-creepy Superman Returns and 'completely-misses-the-point' Man of Steel don't count...)

It shouldn't be impossible to do a decent film with a bunch of the characters as long as the people making these films understand the basics and start with a good script before they start shooting any film!

[Ben]

I repeat...

Yeah...but only one company has bought a bunch of classic characters in the last couple of years and has failed to do anything with them...

[ShyViolet]

Can't believe that the actually cool-sounding films were removed from the schedule! Puss sounded like a lot of fun and so did the two musicals. And no mention of Me and My Shadow.

[EricJ]

Can't believe that the actually cool-sounding films were removed from the schedule! Puss sounded like a lot of fun and so did the two musicals. And no mention of Me and My Shadow.

Wait...they were doing musicals again for the first time in 15 years?
Like, musical-musicals, and not cheap overexposed 70's-80's karaoke?

(checks)
...Oh, wait, it was from one of the blood-tranfusion Disney guys, no wonder.

“I can only say one thing to you: ‘American Sniper,'” Katzenberg said when asked why he’s more amenable to those (January-dump) dates.

(And to paraphrase a classic MST3K-ism: "So....'sniper', huh?")

[Dacey]

OMG, there are no words for the sheer amount of STUPID that there is in that logic!

First of all, American Sniper is clearly an exception to the rule. Heck, it's the exception to many rules, considering it's on its way to becoming 2014's top grossing movie even though it's making all of its money this year. There's no logical way to explain this, especially since similar movies that got much better reviews haven't done well in the past, with a possible explanation being that Warner Bros. did shrewd marketing to church groups, making this a Passion of the Christ sort of hit (bizarre in a way considering it's about, you know, a sniper, but that's a discussion for another topic).

But hey, look at all the big business Paddington is doing! Oh, wait, it's only doing decent business. What about Strange Magic? Oh, right, no one's going. Heck, even hits like Hoodwinked! only made it to the $50 million mark. There is no reason to assume that a DreamWorks film could ever behave like American Sniper. Heck, there's no reason to assume that a Disney or Pixar film could ever perform like American Sniper in January. I don't even know if a Frozen sequel could do that kind of money in January (well, okay, it probably could, but it would certainly do better during a holiday season or "In Summer"). Point being, American Sniper isn't playing by the rules. It was tracking for a $40 million weekend and doubled that. That...simply doesn't happen. But, hey, if JK wants to think he can duplicate that kind of success with Boss Baby, it's his company to ruin.

[EricJ]

Sniper opened in January because it had a limited Oscar-qualification run in December, and is doing big business now because it's one of the only last-minute Best Pictures we can run to check up on that's not on disk, arthouses or digital. (Also, one of the few big-studio genre nominees we've actually heard of.)
If it was a Spielberg-produced live-action Dreamworks nominee like Lincoln, that would justify some of JK"s "See, see?", but as it isn't, that's just as desperate a bit of name-coattailing as you'd expect from him.

The Weinsteins released Paddington in January for the same reason they made "surprise" money with the first Hoodwinked--it's January, the theaters will show anything to clean out the December leftovers, and we'll watch anything new--but it's still considered the low-rent dump.
Which is why Disney used it to bury Strange Magic.

[ShyViolet]

But, hey, if JK wants to think he can duplicate that kind of success with Boss Baby, it's his company to ruin.

Very true Dacey...much as I love Kevin Spacey and much as I hope DreamWorks will bounce back, the idea is stupid and the design we've seen unbelievably ugly. The audience will shrug, no one will go, and DreamWorks will have another write-down. Release in Spring or Summer--when all the blockbusters come out--would be a disaster. But in January?? Suicide.

[Dacey]

To clarify, I'm not implying that Boss Baby is a surefire flop. The concept is fun and easy to sell, and Kevin Spacey is popular right now. We also haven't seen any footage from the film, so a bit early to call it "bad."

Release it in summer or spring, and it could be a decent hit.