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El Squibbonator

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  1. Studio: Fossil Record Animation/The Workshop Based On: Furby toy by Hasbro Director: Chris Wedge Genre: Animation/Comedy/Adventure Release Date: July 10th, Y10 Theater Count: 3,665 Rating: G Format: CGI Budget: $45 million Runtime: 104 minutes Cast Brianna Denski as Beth Spencer Gavin Hammon as Me-Toh, Hoo-vah, The Furby King, other Furbies Kenneth Hudson Campbell as Mr. Spencer Mila Kunis as Mrs. Spencer Israel Thomas-Bruce as Jesse Winslow Fegley as Kyle Dee Bradley Baker as Splat, Smudge, other Gnarlies Plot Summary The film opens with a minivan driving down a suburban road. Inside the minivan, Beth Spencer is staring dejectedly out the window. A 10-year-old girl with shoulder-length brown hair and glasses, she soon reveals the reason she is so upset; her family is moving to a new house. She is especially upset about having to switch schools, and make new friends, something she has never been good at doing. When they pull into the driveway of the new house, Beth immediately makes her way up to the bedroom and flops down on the bed, grumbling to herself about how unfair it is that she had to move away. Her 8-year-old brother Kyle comes to the knocks at her door, offering to let her read one of his comic books, and Beth tells him not to bother her. That night at dinner, Beth eats very little, and goes back to her room. Once there, she sees a strange creature sitting on her bed, resembling a cross between an owl and a hamster. Beth freaks out at the sight of the creature, and thinks it's a prank of some kind, and isn't reassured at all when it speaks to her, introducing itself as Me-Toh and stating that it is a Furby. Beth notes that she seems to be able to understand him even though he isn't speaking English, and Me-Toh tells her this is because she is special; only a few children in the world can connect with Furbies. She hears her mother approaching, and hides Me-Toh under the covers, letting him out again when the coast is clear. That night, Beth turns on the light on her phone and continues talking to Me-Toh, who explains what Furbies do. According to him, Furbies come from a magical land in the sky, and come to Earth to bond with children who are truly imaginative, kindhearted, and optimistic. Beth replies that there must be some kind of mistake, since she isn't feeling very optimistic at all. The next day is Beth's first day at her new school. The other students are unable to see Me-Toh, but they still avoid her. All of them, that is, except for a shy, awkward boy named Jesse. He introduces himself to her at lunch, and she notes that he seems to be sitting away from everyone else. Beth asks if he just moved here too, and if that's why he's by himself, and Jesse explains that he actually has autism, which makes it hard for him to socialize. He also notices Me-Toh, and reveals that he, too, has a Furby friend. Jesse's Furby friend introduces herself as Hoo-vah. Beth's parents notice that she seems less sad, and congratulate her for overcoming the stress of moving. She doesn't tell them that her friendship with Jesse and the Furbies has made her feel much more fulfilled. However, she notices Kyle doing some strange things. That night, as the family settles down to watch a movie (Attack of the Clown Zombies, per Beth's request) the television cuts out. Mr. Spencer blames Kyle for this, but he denies having anything to do with it. Mr. Spencer refuses to listen, and sends Kyle to his room. Beth asks Me-Toh if he knows what's going on, and Me-Toh explains that it's the work of a Gnarlie. Beth goes on to ask what a Gnarlie is, and Me-Toh uses the lens on his forehead to project a picture of one. Gnarlies, according to Me-Toh, are the "evil" counterparts of Furbies; hairy, mischievous creatures who enjoy pulling pranks and making messes. While Furbies bond with children who are kind and selfless, Gnarlies bond with children who are rude and mean, and love to cause trouble. Hoping for answers, Beth calls Jesse and tells him to meet her outside her bedroom window. Hoo-Vah affirms what Me-Toh said, that a Gnarlie is most likely responsible, and invites them to come to a secret clearing in a nearby forest. Beth protests that she isn't allowed to leave without permission, but climbs out the window and follows them anyway. They arrive at the clearing, and discover that it is full of Furbies. Most of them are the same size as Me-Toh and Hoo-Vah, but one in the center of the clearing is much bigger than the rest and wears a crown. Me-Toh states that this is the Furby King, and he rarely shows himself. Long ago, he explains, everyone knew about Furbies, but as time went on people were less willing to believe in magic, and Furbies stopped coming to Earth. But the Gnarlies, the Furbies' "evil" counterparts, still do. Beth asks the Furby King what this has to do with her and Jesse, and he explains that the Furbies have a prophecy that one day, two kind-hearted children will once again befriend Furbies, and allow them to return to Earth. Jesse remarks that this is a lot to take in, and Me-Toh concedes that "I never said it would be easy." Meanwhile, Kyle is in his room, complaining that even though he tried to cheer Beth up, she hasn't talked to him for the past few days, and he feels like she hates him now. We then see who he's talking to-- a pair of Gnarlies named Splat and Smudge. Kyle mentions that tomorrow is the day Beth has to give a report for school, and he vows to make it "a presentation she'll never forget". The two Gnarlies giggle. The next day, Beth arrives at school with Me-Toh in her backpack. She greets Jesse in the hallway, and he reminds her that she has to give a report for class that day. No sooner does she begin to give the report, though, than a bucket of water materializes from nowhere and dumps itself onto her head. Beth is infuriated and humiliated, with everyone except Jesse laughing at her. At lunch, after drying off, she speaks to Jesse, Me-Toh, and Hoo-Vah again, and asks if they think a Gnarly did that too. Me-Toh agrees, but asks if she has any idea who it was bonded to. Beth hesitates for a moment, realizing that since she's such a new student, most of the kids don't know her well enough to have any kind of grudge against her. Then it gradually dawns on her that Kyle must be the one responsible. However, as Beth, Jesse, Me-Toh, and Hoo-Vah frantically search for Kyle, they realize that many of the children at the school have Gnarlies accompanying them. And many of these children-- ranging from kindergartners to fifth-graders-- are leaving their classrooms and congregating on the playground. Beth and her friends follow them, and notice that all the kids with Gnarlies are surrounding none other than Kyle, who has apparently declared himself their leader. Accompanying him are Splat and Smudge, who are laughing madly and seem eager to cause more mischief. At Splat's command, the Gnarlies proceed to trash the school-- tearing down posters, flushing things down the toilets, throwing food around the cafeteria, and in general causing chaos, much to the confusion of the teachers and staff, who can't see them. Beth and Jesse head back to the clearing in the woods, only to find it deserted, with almost all of the Furbies gone and an ominous black cloud overhead. The Furby King is still there, and he pleads with Beth to stop the Gnarlies before it is too late, and the world is overrun by negativity and spite. Before she can say anything else, the Furby King is sucked into the cloud, and Beth asks Me-Toh if there's anything left to do. Jesse suggests that they should go back and fight the Gnarlies, and Beth is initially eager to do this. They go back to the schoolyard, where the other kids and their Gnarly companions are still causing chaos. When they notice how many of them there are, Beth starts to have second thoughts, and Splat and Smudge taunt her. Me-Toh, Hoo-Vah, and Jesse ask her what she's going to do, and she replies, "Something I should have done a long time ago." Beth approaches Kyle, and apologizes to him, telling him that she wasn't trying to be mean when she stopped talking to him. Kyle accepts her apology, and when he does, the Gnarlies begin to transform. They start to glow, and when the light subsides, they are revealed to have turned into Furbies themselves. Kyle admits that he let Beth's apparent rejection of him get to his head, and he apologizes for the trouble he caused. The Furbies rejoin their new human friends. That night at dinner, Beth and Kyle have invited Jesse over, and the three of them, together with their Furby friends, discuss what their next adventure will be. The scene zooms out away from the house, and pans out into Furbyland high in the sky, where the Furby King watches them contentedly. In a mid-credits scene, a Gnarly opens up Beth's closet at night and laughs maniacally.
  2. I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but at this rate I wonder if Warner Bros. Pictures Animation even has a future. The Day The Earth Blew Up and The Lord of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim aren’t being released under the WBPA banner, and they don’t have any other movies with a release date planned except for The Cat In The Hat, in 2025. On the surface that would seem like a surefire hit, given how beloved Dr. Seuss is, but we thought Coyote V Acme was an obvious success too and look what happened.
  3. Coyote V Acme has been cancelled again-- for real this time. WB tried to market it to other distributors, including Paramount and Amazon, but none of them offered a high enough bid for their liking and they have once again written the movie off. I'm definitely disappointed by this, but I can't say I'm surprised given how the company has treated its movies in the past few years. The Day The Earth Blew Up, another Looney Tunes movie, was lucky to get picked up for distribution by GFM Animation. But beyond that, who knows? Which WB movies and franchises can we consider "safe"?
  4. A little under a week ago, Rebellion Studios, the newly established film and TV division of Rebellion Developments, which owns the comic magazine 2000 AD, announced that its first project would be an animated Rogue Trooper movie. The movie is expected to finish production next year, with Duncan Jones as director and Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden leading the cast. A release date hasn't been set, but a tweet from the studio implies that they are planning to give it a theatrical release. If true, this could be a real game-changer for British animation, which-- occasional isolated hits like Chicken Run aside-- has never achieved the worldwide status of its counterparts in America and Japan.
  5. I remember back in 2020, the LEGO movie rights went to Universal after The LEGO Movie 2 didn't meet expectations. I imagine if Universal were aiming this movie mostly at kids, the way Warner Bros.'s LEGO movies were, they'd have given it to either DreamWorks or Illumination. Instead, it's being released under the Focus Features label, which honestly raises more questions than it answers. Focus Features has released very few animated movies, but those include Coraline, ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, and 9 (a weird post-apocalyptic CGI movie that unfortunately was not successful). With that taken into account, I think it's fair to assume this won't be pitched at the same audience as a "normal" animated movie.
  6. Nothing against your assessment of my movie, but aren’t CAYOM reviews supposed to be done from an in-universe perspective? If that’s the case, referring to the actors as “fictional” kind of goes against the idea of it.
  7. PG is my gut feeling too, but a “light” PG-13 wouldn’t surprise me considering this is a an awards-season biopic no doubt pitched at Williams’s teen and young adult fans.
  8. Does it have to be? No. Is it cool that it is? Absolutely. Even so, I have a bunch of questions. How much are they spending on this, and for a theatrical release in this day and age no less? It strikes me more as the kind of thing that would do well on streaming, though if its budget is low it could be a modest success in theaters. And what sort of rating are they going for?
  9. If there's one thing this indicates, it's that the "hip, post-modern musical" formula that made Disney so much money during the 2010s is getting played out, just as the Broadway-style musical formula did at the end of the 1990s. So what new formula is going to replace it?
  10. So if the movie's out on digital now, can we officially call it that this has no chance of even reaching the $250 million mark?
  11. Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon are both cable networks, and nowadays cable is rapidly fading in relevance compared to streaming. One thing Cartoon Network has going for it that Nickelodeon doesn't is Adult Swim, which actually gets higher viewership ratings than daytime Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. There's a reason for that-- children nowadays are more likely to watch their TV on streaming services, while Adult Swim's audience consists of young adults in their 20s and 30s who are more likely to still watch cable. According to Variety, Boomerang's and Cartoon Network's viewership combined is less than Adult Swim (386,000 versus 278,000). Plus, Adult Swim is a valuable IP in its own right, home to shows like Rick and Morty, Smiling Friends, and Primal. In any case, since this is technically an acquisition rather than a true merger, it's more likely that Paramount is going to suffer the same fate as Fox did under Disney, with any projects that Warner Bros. deems un-viable being cancelled or given little promotion. Hence my fear regarding the Avatar: The Last Airbender movies. Paramount does have lots of big-ticked IP that Warner Bros. would probably love to get its hands on, like SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Star Trek, but anything else is probably in trouble.
  12. Speaking of movies called Avatar (in this case, the Nickelodeon one, not the Dances With Smurfs one), that's one of the projects I'm worried is going to get canned if this merger goes through.
  13. It would be hilarious, though, if Paramount distributes Coyote Vs. ACME, then ends up getting bought by Warner Bros. anyway-- it would make the whole effort to have the movie written off entirely pointless, because at the end of the day they'd still own the distribution rights to it!
  14. Now I'm hoping this doesn't happen, because there are a bunch of movies in development at both Warner Bros. and Paramount that I'd hate to see get axed. Paramount has an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie planned for 2025, for example; you think Warner Bros. would keep that around?
  15. So if the WB/Paramount merger happens, does this mean we can expect even more cancellations?
  16. Partly because Disney seems to insist it is. They're playing it up-- in the advertising anyway-- as a homage to their classic animated movies, and from what I head it feels like an amalgamation of a bunch of famous "old-school" Disney movies with no real identity of its own. Maybe it'll be a hit with kids anyway, but in a year that's already given us The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, I can't picture it grabbing kids' attention the way, say, Frozen or Moana did.
  17. At this rate I'm worried we might never have enough films for a full year.
  18. The real irony here is that when Strange World flopped, a lot of analysts-- including on this very forum-- were quick to blame it on the fact that it was so different from a "typical" Disney movie, being as it was a science-fiction adventure story with a gay main character. The implication was that Wish, being closer to what people expect out of Disney, would inevitably be more successful. But if that turns out not to be the case, and Wish is another flop, that would be really bad news for Disney. Not just in the sense that they would have lost money on the movie, but in the sense that a formula that has worked for them ever since Snow White and the Seven Dwarves might be damaged beyond repair. If Disney is going to make successful animated movies again, they're going to have to do something they haven't done in a very long time-- innovate.
  19. So I'm curious about "The Day The Earth Blew Up: The Looney Tunes Movie". On the one hand, it seems to be in a more secure position than ''Coyote V Acme'' was. GFM Animation has been confirmed to be distributing it outside the United States, whereas with ''Coyote V Acme'' they didn't even bother to find an alternate distributor. They just dumped it, no questions asked. Here it is on GFM's own website. GFM's last animated movie was ''Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank'', which came out in July 2022 and had its first trailer released in April of that year. So we may still see some promotion for this movie yet. The real question, I suppose, is its budget. There haven't really been all that many all-2D animated movies in the past decade to compare it to, but the ones that we have seem not to have been very expensive by animated movie standards. ''Teen Titans Go! To The Movies'' cost $10 million, ''My Little Pony: The Movie'' cost $6 million, and ''The Bob's Burgers Movie'' cost $38 million (which I find a bit hard to believe considering it seems to have had the lowest production values of the three). We know ''Coyote V Acme'' supposedly had a $70 million budget, but it was a live-action/CGI hybrid. As an all-2D film, I can't picture "The Day The Earth Blew Up" costing much more than $25 million.
  20. What do you mean, can't blame him? The fact is, what he's doing makes no sense from a financial perspective. It's been established for a long time now that Zaslav wants to make Warner Bros' movies exclusive to theaters, and seems to be trying to de-emphasize HBO Max whenever possible. Would it have made more sense to move forward with things like Batgirl and Coyote V Acme? Absolutely. But because they weren't intended for theaters (although Coyote V Acme was suggested to go to theaters at one point) they were seen as lesser than theatrical films, and therefore "disposable". Now, I'll retract my earlier statement because I don't think I can say for certain if Zaslav actually does hate HBO Max. But the effect is still the same.
  21. Because Zaslav doesn't like streaming, period. You don't even have to take my word for it. He spells it out right here.
  22. We should still be getting The Day The Earth Blew Up next year, hopefully. *crosses fingers*
  23. According to The Hollywood Reporter: This implies to me that the planned theatrical release, if there ever was one, was nothing more than an idea being floated around, and it was still officially considered an HBO Max project when it was cancelled. Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has announced its intent to re-focus on theatrical films, of which several are currently in production.
  24. I get the impression that in particular Zaslav hates-- or at least doesn't trust-- HBO Max and is actively trying to sabotage it. Notice how Batgirl, an HBO Max film, was cancelled, but The Flash, despite being an objectively much less commercially viable movie, was put in theaters and ended up losing $200 million. WB honestly would have been better off cancelling The Flash, which was clearly going to be a nightmare to market and had a controversial lead actor. But instead they dumped Batgirl, which had a lower budget, was attached to the much more lucrative Batman brand, and would have gone straight to streaming. And now they've done the same with Coyote V. Acme. While the other big studios are more than happy to put big-budget, big-ticket movies on their streaming services, Warner Bros. under Zaslav has been very reluctant to do the same. The majority of movies that have been written off for tax purposes have been HBO Max projects.
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