El Squibbonator

What do you think it's ceiling is? 180M?

The more pertinent question is, does Lightyear still have a shot at 200M DOM?

Speaking of which, Solo came within a hair's breadth of $400 million worldwide. If Lightyear performs similarly, it might at the very least double its budget.

I'm kind of struggling to find a good comparison among existing Disney and Pixar movies to Lightyear's performance. The best ones I can think of at the moment are Brave and Cars 2. Brave and Cars 2 were both Pixar movies that suffered from poor word of mouth and a general perception that they were lesser efforts from the studio. They both earned around $25 million in their respective first days, while Lightyear has earned $21 million in the same amount of time. Both Brave and Cars 2, moreover, opened at around $66-68 million. A comparable opening for Lightyear would then give us an opening of about $56 million. Other Pixar movies have had similar openings, but they were kept afloat by strong overseas grosses (Coco, Ratatouille), or good reception. Lightyear doesn't have either of those factors working in its favor. Taking the Brave/Cars 2 comparison further, we might be looking at a domestic gross of around $180 million for Lightyear. The overseas gross is harder to predict, but it'll probably be quite a bit less than what Brave made, especially considering the lack of a Chinese release. In the absence of any proper data, and in the interest of speculating (Oh my god! An unsupported guess! The horror!), I took the liberty of hypothesizing it'll be about 75% of Brave's overseas gross, using the probable domestic opening as a rough guide. If that's the case, Lightyear's final worldwide gross might be more than $400 million. But not a whole lot more.

If word-of mouth affects it similarly to the way it seems to be affecting Lightyear, I think Wreck-it Ralph numbers (that is, somewhere between $450 and $500 million) are a reasonable expectation for this movie. It certainly doesn't look like it'll be up there in Zootopia/Moana/Frozen/Big Hero 6 territory.

I know it's dangerous to calculate how a movie will do once it's been released, but I feel like living dangerously. But let's start with what we know for a fact. Lightyear has earned $23 million domestically on its first full day. That's less than half of what Toy Story 4 (the last Pixar movie to have a full theatrical release before the pandemic) made in the same amount of time, but it's still more than twice what Onward and The Good Dinosaur made. Both Onward and The Good Dinosaur finished their domestic opening weekends at slightly under $40 million. If we assume Lightyear plays like that, instead of like a typical Toy Story movie, then that $23 million first day might translate to roughly $65 million. I think a particularly good comparison to make in this case might actually be Brave. Like Lightyear, Brave was a Pixar movie that received good-but-not-great reviews, and opened in the $60 million range. Brave earned $237 million domestically, and I think it's reasonable to expect something similar, if not slightly higher, from Lightyear (unlike Brave, Lightyear will have the advantage of being more attractive to young boys). $250 million domestic seems reasonable. The big question is what role international grosses will play. Lightyear has been banned in 14 countries, and China has claimed they won't be showing it either. But most of the countries that have banned it aren't typically major contributors to the overseas grosses of Pixar movies. Neither, for that matter, is China; while Walt Disney Animation Studios movies often do very well in China, Pixar tends to struggle there. Coco, in 2017, was the only real exception, earning more money in China than it did domestically. Returning to our comparison to Brave for a moment, that movie made $28 million in China, out of a $540 million global total. Taking that as a baseline, I think $450-$500 million worldwide isn't an unrealistic expectation for Lightyear. That would put it in about the same territory as WALL-E and Brave.

My feelings for this movie could probably best be described as "very cautiously optimistic." When I saw the first teaser for Raya and the Last Dragon, I was really excited, because it looked like a movie that was decidedly outside Disney's wheelhouse. Having watched the actual movie, of course, I now know that wasn't the case. I want to look forward to Strange World, since there's so much stuff in that teaser I like— the creature designs, the gorgeous animation, the way the characters look— but in the back of my mind I feel like the end result is going to be a lot more generic and boilerplate than what the teaser is promising. But maybe not. This is a problem I've had with a lot of recent Disney Animation movies, and to a lesser extent some Pixar movies as well. They have beautifully, wildly imaginative settings, and they squander them with bog-standard plots. Raya and the Last Dragon (which, somewhat ominously, is by the same director as this movie) is by far the worst offender, but Zootopia, Moana, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, and even Encanto have this issue too. Not all of them have this on the same level, of course, but if you've watched Disney for as long as I have it's definitely noticeable. It feels like Disney has a few "stock" movie plots it keeps shuffling and re-dealing, and it relies on visually spectacular settings to keep them looking new.

Sorry if this is a rather random topic, but it's something I'm curious about. Should I be trusting Slashfilm as a source of information on movie budgets and the like, seeing as they never cite their sources on the matter? For example, this article claims that The Bob's Burgers Movie cost $60 million. The only other place I've seen that figure mentioned was on Filmik, a site known for its lack of integrity and reliability. So if Slashfilm is propagating information that may or may not be true, possibly taken from sites with poor reliability records, how reliable can we consider Slashfilm? I understand it's a very popular site for movie news, but should we be taking anything it says with a grain of salt?

Based On: TV series of the same name Studio: The Workshop, Inc. Director: John M. Carrigan* Genre: Animation/Fantasy/Children's Release Date: August 1st, Y9 Theater Count: 3104 Rating: PG (fantasy violence) Format: CGI Animation Budget: $45 million Runtime: 117 minutes (1 hour and 57 minutes) Major Cast: Clarissa May Jones* as Sarah Spencer Brock Armstrong* as Ryan Spencer Hayden Moss* as David, Bonehead Jacob Harris* as Paul John C. Reilly as Allo Ed Vincent* as Stego, Ankylo Laura Mallon* as Teryx James N. Midas* as Stego Garth Shoemaker* as The Dinosorcerer Frank Welker as Genghis Rex Alan Tudyk as The Lord of Dinopolis Benedict Wong as General Tarbo Summary:

I'm hoping to put my second Workshop movie for this year, Dinosaucers, sometime in August, around the same time the studio released Frankenstein Jr. last year.

So it now as though Bob's Burgers is set to reach the $15M mark on its domestic opening weekend. If its budget is similar to that of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America or South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (that is, roughly $20M), then that actually isn't too bad an opening.

$200 million for a biopic?

That's. . . actually not bad.

I can confirm it's because of spoilers. Someone leaked the movie's plot on Reddit, and thousands if not millions of people saw it before it was taken down. How do I know this? Because I was one of the people who saw the leak. And no, I won't say what was in it.

Regardless of how popular Bob's Burgers itself is, I feel I have good reason to be skeptical of Filmik's statement that the movie's budget was $60 million. More significantly, if we assume the budget is indeed closer to $20 million, then a $10-12 million opening weekend might not be as bad as we've been making it out to be.

Is it too early to start speculating about how League of Super-Pets will do? My (admittedly uninformed) guess is between 275-325M WW.

I found out something that could change things regarding the way we evaluate this movie. To elaborate, it's come to my attention that the $60 million figure for the budget of The Bob's Burgers Movie DOES NOT COME FROM A RELIABLE SOURCE. It was taken from a website called Filmik, which has a history of making such statements about movie budgets with no official information to back them up. While I obviously can't speak for what the movie's actual budget is, the fact remains that we should not be taking the statement that it cost $60 million as fact. As for what it did cost, I obviously can't give an authoritative answer. However, I do think I can make an educated guess. Instead of comparing it to The Simpsons Movie, we might be better served comparing it to Beavis and Butt-Head Do America or South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Both of these movies cost roughly $20 million, which is about a third of what The Simpsons Movie cost. Compared to The Simpsons, which is a globally-beloved show watched by both adults and children, South Park and Beavis and Butt-Head have narrower target audiences and are less popular outside the United States. Bob's Burgers is vaguely comparable in that respect. Consider, too, that even in their prime, South Park and Beavis and Butt-Head were nowhere near the cornerstones of pop culture that The Simpsons was. Spending $60 million on a movie made sense for The Simpsons, but not really for any other primetime cartoon. It would not surprise me, then, if the real budget for The Bob's Burgers Movie is closer to that of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut than The Simpsons Movie.

I don't know where else to put this, but I have a bit of a PSA to make. The $60 million budget mentioned for The Bob's Burgers Movie IS FROM AN UNRELIABLE SOURCE. The website it was taken from is called Filmik, and they have a history of putting out information about movies with no sources to back them up, and therefore any data from them cannot be considered reliable. They also declared that the budget of League of Super-Pets was $130 million, again without providing any sources. The takeaway is, Filmix is not reliable. They cannot be considered a good source of movie budgets.

Well, Skydance's upcoming movie, Luck, is coming out on Apple TV+, so I imagine Ray Gunn will as well.

@CAYOMMagazine What do you get when you combine a scheming drug dealer, a horny sea monster, and an incompetent psychiatrist? According to Fossil Record Studios head Mark Pierce, the answer is The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, a raunchy R-rated animated comedy based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Moore. The movie is scheduled for release in the summer of Y10, and represents a break from Fossil Record's typical fare of science-fiction and fantasy dramas. Unlike most other animation studios, Fossil Record has typically shied away from comedy, with the exception of last year's flop Funny Business.

I'm also curious about the upcoming animated adaptation of The Great Gatsby. It's being produced by DNEG Animation and written by William Joyce. Also, Joyce replied to a tweet claiming he hopes the movie gets a theatrical release. That's no guarantee it will, of course, but he clearly has a vested interest in that happening, and it's not being produced directly for a streaming service. It seems like the sort of movie A24 might pick up, for example. On the subject of A24, they're also making the stop-motion/live-action hybrid movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which honestly looks adorable. Of course, Marcel seems aimed at a much younger audience than most of what A24 makes, but if they're distributing animated movies now, I'm willing to bet it's only a matter of time before they put a PG-13 or R-rated one out in theaters. Offbeat movies aimed at adult audiences are kind of their thing, after all. The question is whether they'll do it before a major studio (at this point, almost certainly Sony) does. Either way, I cautiously predict a successful theatrical adult animated drama film within the next decade.

I'm bumping this thread in light of the likely box-office failure of The Bob's Burgers Movie. Now, obviously that movie is a comedy, and hence outside the scope of what I originally made this thread about. However, if audiences aren't turning out for a movie based on Bob's Burgers--a reasonably popular TV show-- that does make it seem a lot less likely that they'll go to a theater for a completely original adult animated movie.

Am I alone in thinking Bob's Burgers might overperform relative to the projections we've made? I've been seeing a lot of promotion for it, so I can see it opening closer to $15 million, or even $20 million if word of mouth is especially good. Then again, this is coming from the guy who was convinced PAW Patrol: The Movie would flop, so what am I saying?

Now that the submission deadline has passed, should we update the release schedule for Y9?

Raven Island Studio: Fossil Record Animation Director: Rebecca Daintree Genre: Animation, Fantasy, Family Release Date: September 19th Y9 Rating: PG (violence, thematic elements) Budget: $20 Million Runtime: 2 hr 19 min Format: hand-drawn animation Theater Count: 2,055 Main Cast: Clarissa May Jones* as Jessica Taylor Mary Waterstone* as Claire Taylor John Wilkins* as Dohra-Kaa Stephen Bryce* as The Watcher Harry Richard Milhouse* as Corax *fictional Summary: