Illumination which has become the biggest in animation at the box office which unlike WB knows how to market family films, which has not had an animated film over 275M (only three of their films have gone under 200M (Sing 2 got hurt mainly due to Omicron)). Also Mario will skew much younger than Pikachu mainly because it’s wholly animated and will likely from a marketing perspective focus more on the comedy. Mario also benefits from being the first family/animated film since the holidays with no major competition to hurt it. I’d be shocked if it did under Sonic 2.
No but I can see a feast or famine thing for it. One situation where it overperforms massively beyond our expectations and does $300m+ domestic, and another where it underperforms and does slightly under the first by 5-10% ($170m-$180m)
Ant Man and Mario could both do the 200-300m range but I think both go over 300m is likely.
Puss in Boots I feel moreso around mid 100m but I mean it’s doing surprisingly well Quorom tracking, the de facto number 2 choice against Avatwo and I think nostalgia will help it some.
Also the book doesn’t really say what race Ariel is either just that her skin is free of blemishes and on top of that fairy tales have been adapted and changed multiple times over history, honestly don’t get why we’re taking bait from a less than subtle bigot.
Lowkey the movie looks like ass and I suspect it’ll be like other soulless Disney remakes but the one thing this has over other remakes is Halle Ariel is a damn great choice, and judging by her Part of the World, she is oddly the only lead in these remakes that can really sing.
The whole Q1 slate for animation is packed as the current schedule is animation every two weeks:
Tiger - 1/19/24
Toto - 2/2/24
Garfield - 2/16/24
Elio - 3/1/24
KFP4 - 3/8/24
Beyond Spidey - 3/29/24
Anyways feel pretty confident in this doing 400m domestic. No big family films since Mario and no real threatening competition at all this summer, if reviews are decent this should do well.
We got a half-sister as the lead, I believe.
i still find it funny of how much Chapek prefers WDAS as they can bring Ariana Debose an Oscar Winner, and Jack Gyllenhaal, Lucy Liu and Randy Quaid for their films and you know like hell everyone for Frozen 3 is coming back but can’t afford to pay Kaling or Hader for a sequel to one of Pixar’s biggest films?!