Sal

Here are some previews for a project I'm doing some work on. It remains to be seen if this will be animated, but a lot of my animation influences are pretty clear here. This is a basic sci-fi story in the noir/mystery vein but with brighter colours.

I would have preferred a more camel/equine look. Cats and dogs are so overused in the design of everything nowadays. There are a ton of weird animals that would make for excellent (and unique) dragon designs. They don't all have to be Cat/Dog with wings 2.0 Seriously. Ditching one overused design element for another overused design element isn't really being particularly bold or unique.

I am a huge fan of the original and I can't even- I was really excited for this, but I don't even know how it's meant to resemble the original given the changes mentioned in Pete's backstory. Also the design for Elliott is kind of wtf. They could have made him furry and kept him looking like a dragon, especially in the face.

...well, one more reason I'm not going to waste my money on this movie. I really don't see the appeal of that man. At all.

No word on Friday numbers yet?

People are impressed by Zootopia's run, but its success has nothing to do with BvS doing well or not doing well. Zootopia would be doing well even if BvS was raking in huge money. I just don't get why there is a need to compare the two as if their successes are mutually exclusive or like it's some kind of contest. Why not instead compare BvS to Deadpool, Avengers or F7 specifically as more relevant films? I mean just as many people (if not more, from what I've seen) are gloating on the success of Deadpool compared to BvS. By comparison, most of the posts about Zootopia are just impressed it's doing well. Someone saying they're impressed that an animated movie is doing better than a seemingly guaranteed blockbuster isn't automatically gloating. If you want gloating, look at the posts that talk about "how X movie sucks in comparison to Y other movie" for a better example. Superhero movies do far more money on average than Animated films. It's just a fact. An animated film (and a non-sequel) that most people estimated at under 250m (and in many cases under 200m) doing better than a movie most people thought would easily clear 400 to 500m domestically is impressive no matter how you stack it. ...also the majority of the Zootopia related posts don't even mention BvS? Like most of the Marvel related posts definitely bring it up, but most of the Zootopia posts have pretty much been "omfg this is doing so well, yay!"

Does anyone else find it amusing that SWXII is picking on a kids' movie rather than anything in vaguely the same genre/age range as BVS?

Yeah. Animated movies go against Live Action quite a bit, it's not as bad as two of them going head to head against each other. I'm not sure how well MLP will do, since a lot of the time having an ongoing tv show associated with an animated movie seems to cause a drop in urgency to go see the movie... OTOH, that's almost always been related to an animated series sandwiched in-between two movies and MLP has not had a theatrical release film. (And it also didn't particularly affect Transformers, but the movies and animated shows were different beasts altogether)

...do they seriously think sandwiching this between My Little Pony and a Pixar release is a good idea?

There's quite a few people in the club too. A fair number of folks thought it could make it.

...Have you seen how much the Transformers films made?

Do we have Wed numbers for Zootopia yet?

I don't get the kneejerk reactions among a lot of comic book fans. Disliking a movie doesn't mean you're a troll for the other 'team'. Yet the response to any criticism in the thread seems to be "you're just a Marvel fanboy". Because clearly there's no other possible reason to dislike this movie. I have always considered myself more of a DC fan than a Marvel fan. I pick up way more DC Comics, I watch every DC animated movie that comes out. I was - and still am - a tremendous fan of BTAS and JL/JLU (and really, everything Timm/Dini produce). One of my biggest comic influences is Dwayne McDuffie (I was inconsolable for a long while after he died). I even loved the cartoon version of Teen Titans. I can't think of a Marvel cartoon I've watched in its entirety since the old X-Men series. When it comes to the movies, I liked GotG, Ant-Man and the first Captain America and was middling on just about everything else. So believe me when I say that I don't go into a film like this hoping it'll be bad. I mean that's just a ridiculous thing to hope for. If this movie is bad, then I'll never get my JL movie I want so badly, and if they can't make a decent movie with Batman and Superman, two of the biggest names in DC, then I don't have any chance of seeing some of my more obscure DC faves, like Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, making their big-screen debuts. I want to believe this movie is something I would like... but I don't believe it based on what I've seen in trailers and heard about both from critics and fans (both what they liked and didn't like). I'm already not super huge on Zack Snyder's movies, finding that they tend to favour style over substance. It's kind of like Michael Bay, but if Michael Bay wasn't obsessed with explosions and ball-jokes and was instead a hipster art student who really likes using colour filters on everything. He seems to have no real ability to pick a story or show characterization, much less to show characterization consistent with what I've enjoyed in the comics. I think I would have liked this movie in someone else's hands. The majority of the cast sounds great to me and I've heard nothing but good things about Affleck as Batman. But given my personal experience with Snyder's films AND the criticisms I've heard that mostly confirm that this has those same elements, I don't want to see it. And based on these factors, I'm pretty confident that watching it 'to give it a chance' isn't going to do anything but waste $30-$40 that I can't easily spare. Stating that I don't like it, in this case, has nothing to do with liking or not liking other Marvel/DC movies, and everything to do with past experiences, my knowledge of my own taste in movies and the reviews I've seen/heard. Could I be wrong? Yeah. I'll probably watch it at some point when one of my friends inevitably gets the Blu-Ray. If so, I'll be delightfully surprised. Until then I'm not going out of my way. TL;DR: Disliking this movie doesn't make you a DC Hater/Marvel troll. People need to learn that there's more reasons to dislike something than because you're a fan of the competition. That kind of back and forth discussion and accusation is really kind of pointless, isn't it?

I don't know about your area, but in this area, most parents seem to scramble a lot on fridays. Our local grocery stores have been packed with all the people buying last minute supplies for Easter. I expect Zootopia may do better today, since a lot of parents also seem to like getting the kids out of the house while they do prep work for tomorrow.

So here's the question for me. Just from what I'm hearing, this does not sound like a particularly family friendly movie. How much is this going to affect Zootopia's drops this weekend. Personally, just based on what I've seen (and the fact that an R-rated cut apparently exists and pisses me off if what I've heard about it is true), I would never take my roommate's nieces and nephews to see this. I don't know if many people feel the same way, but if so I don't think Zootopia has much to worry about, despite the number of people talking about how this movie would cut its legs out from under it with families.

I was about to post that. Poor boy. I hope it's not too bad...

Simple. Most of them outsource to places where they're paying a lot less. Also they tend to use more simplistic animation styles. Some things are just easier to animate (like when they mentioned the problem of hair/fur/environments earlier). Creating the rigs for CG animation makes things a lot easier, but it still adds time and cost to the process since you have to pay someone to design and create them. Plus the more (and more varied characters) in a movie, the more you have to design and the more you tack onto initial cost even before the animation. Sequels are cheaper, generally speaking, in this respect because they already have base rigs they can use. Even if they update them and make them more detailed, it's a starting point that lowers the cost. I've done animation myself and I can tell you that a smooth surface is much easier to animate than something textured. It takes 9 months to animate an episode of most traditionally drawn cartoons. It takes me months to animate a two minute sequence. Both benefit from being intensely simple designs easy to repeat but it still takes forever. I mean animation folks here in the US don't get paid all that much comparatively, but in places like Japan, a starting animator can be earning about 16,000 a year on their work. Korea is likely even cheaper. Not to mention voice acting is not cheap either. I can tell you that the baseline for a virtually unknown VA is between $200 and $500 per hour in the recording booth. That's not an hour of dialogue or usable content (in fact, if you're lucky, you can get between 15 and 30 minutes of usable content in a two hour recording session). Now up that price for all the celebrities they hire (because most celebrities are charging a lot more in the recording booth and fool around a lot more), add on the many bg voices and you're looking at a hefty chunk. Animation is hard. It's a lot of work and it's very expensive.

Any word on Monday numbers?

The original showing of Zootopia at 7pm was sold out when we walked up. Should have bought ahead. Luckily we were able to buy tickets for a later showing, which also sold out by the time we returned to the theater half an hour later.

I'm surprised Fantastic Four is still holding onto that many theaters.

I just make a note that it's just "The Last Airbender". Avatar the Last Airbender is an amazing cartoon.

Let me just say that I don't have a lot of faith in movie studios in general when it comes to cultural representation. Also despite studying fish physiology, in Finding Nemo they totally don't mention that a male clownfish will change gender in the absence of a female.

Oh dear. I was excited for this, but the basic description doesn't fill me full of hope. It does sound a bit much like The Book of Life, which at least had the advantage of being made by a Mexican and Latino crew. I'm not sure about Pixar's ability to represent a different culture and I hope that at the very least they do their research and hire some cultural advisors (preferably ones who are actually Mexican or Mexican-American)

Not when the interstate is shut down Of course my Canadian roommate and my girlfriend from Wisconsin both think everyone from any state south of the Wisconsin border are 'Southerners' and can't handle snow. Given the inordinate number of traffic accidents whenever we get a dusting around here, I'm inclined to agree. OTOH: the snow certainly didn't bother Frozen's Box Office run when it was out.

I keep hearing these announcements for Stephen King novels made into movies and yet they never see the light of day. Wasn't "Cell" supposed to be finished filming over a year ago for a 2014 release? I really want to see IT as an updated movie, but damn are they making it hard for me to actually keep my hopes up that it'll really happen.