TServo2049

I also didn't see many films this year, and the one upcoming release I am seeing will almost certainly not rank in my top 3, so I am comfortable in giving my top 3 out of what I've seen the year: 1. How to Train Your Dragon 2 2. Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Big Hero 6

Hubris is his middle name. I guess Frank Wells was the only person who could keep Katzenberg's raging ego in check.

Lionsgate is not a bad idea. They haven't done anything in animation except for Battle for Terra (and Summit released Astro Boy when they were still independent). If Fox decides they don't want to continue distributing DWA after 2017, Lionsgate is probably the only company left who would have interest in releasing their product. The only other entity without in-house animation product is Weinstein, but Harvey is just as big of an egocentric control freak, so putting them in the same room would probably cause a chain reaction that could unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe. (Granted, that's a worst-case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.) [i couldn't help it, I had to quote Doc Brown there.]

E.T. was almost as crazy as Titanic - even though its run was spread out over a longer period of time, adjusted for inflation it didn't have a single weekend PTA under $3,000 for 52 weeks, and on only three out of those 52 was it out of the top 12. It made a billion dollars adjusted in first run, and yet its highest daily gross out of its entire run adjusts to only $14.3 million.

But back then, there was still no guarantee that the VHS release would be quick. Huge movies like Titanic and Jurassic Park could still take over a year to come to video. Unlike something like Frozen, where they probably internally scheduled the home release before the film was even in theaters, I am sure that films like that were deliberately held back to get as much theatrical mileage as possible. The anecdote I like to relate is that Jurassic Park was depicted as a VHS tape on an episode of Animaniacs almost a year before it actually hit video.

It was $221 million from May 1977-July 1978. BOM does not separate out any reissue grosses prior to 1982. Star Wars did not have as successful a first run as Titanic in terms of ticket sales. However, the population was smaller, the market was smaller, there were fewer theaters, and the legs were even more insane.

I think there are people here who would consider MI:Ghost Protocol to qualify. And that was directed by a Pixar veteran, too. But yeah, still not very many.

I don't care if they were fantasy movies with CGI. I still consider the LOTR trilogy to be the modern equivalents of Lawrence, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, and so forth. Epic, sweeping, incredibly expensive, yet still with mass audience appeal.

Well, it could also be a Matrix/Pirates situation, where 8 and 9 are one long story and not 8.1 and 8.2. In which case we blame...Robert Zemeckis for starting the whole idea with Back to the Future?

I wonder if this deal would mean they'd have to sell the 80s He-Man cartoon rights to Mattel...

I've never heard of something like that. Are you at liberty to say exactly where this is?

I was referring to Disney films, sorry I didn't make that clear. In the last 15 years, here are the highest adjusted totals for non-Pixar Disney animated features: Frozen Tarzan ($273m adj.) Dinosaur ($207m adj.) Tangled ($204m adj.) Lilo and Stitch ($204m adj.)

As long as it passes $208m, it will still be the second highest-attended non-Pixar feature since Tarzan.

Other studios and producers getting the wrong idea from a film's unexpected runaway success? Must be a day that ends in Y... ...and I think it's hilarious that this is going to cost MORE than The Lego Movie did.

I wouldn't be surprised if Universal gives Fast 8 to Lin as a consolation prize for having put Aaron Cross 2 on indefinite hiatus.

I can picture a DOM/OS percentage split on the level of something like Tintin.

Hollywood has nothing to do with this, it's a French production. (I have no idea how big a release this will get in the States...I know Little Prince still has no U.S. date.)

So basically this could be like Cats Don't Dance with even less marketing. A nearly-finished film that was acquired in the purchase of another company (Cats was almost done when the Turner/WB deal happened), and is not really a going concern to the new ownership. Though unlike Cats and Mars Needs Moms, the animation studio that made it will at least still be in operation when the film comes out...

The point was that Madagascar 3 is more likely to help Penguins than hurt it (as Fullbuster insinuated), because it went over well. Again - there will be a circus afro callback (call-forward?) in this movie.

But the 3rd movie was still popular. Highest-grossing of the three (though not highest-attended). And it did gangbusters OS - remember, it has the highest foreign gross of any DWA film (though I'm not sure if Shrek 2+3 sold more tickets OS). There is a reason that there will be a scene in Penguins where one of the penguins rocks a circus afro. (I caught that in the latest trailer when I was at BH6.)

Did you just reference the Lost in Space movie?! William Hurt seemed like he was about to fall asleep delivering that line.

Mon-Tues is basically a two-day holiday (some schools/etc. observe Veteran's Day on Monday - my commute was lighter than usual yesterday, though not as light as today) so yeah, Wednesday will probably drop hard due to the holiday observance being stretched out over two adjacent days.

Crossing my fingers that they pull a Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and call this something like "My Bigger Fatter Greeker Wedding".

Well, at least it looks better than any of Disney's prior off-season non-WDAS/Pixar animated releases (Valiant, The Wild, Mars Needs Moms). I was wondering when ILM would do another animated feature.

Nobody knows what this is.