43 Comments »   posted in Business, China, DreamWorks Animation, DreamWorks East

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The year isn’t over yet, but barring a record-shattering gross by Tintin or Happy Feet 2, we already know what will become the highest-grossing animated project of 2011.

Drumroll, please. . . and the film is . . .

. . . actually, it’s not a film at all. It’s a videogame:

Activision’s release of the videogame “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ last Tuesday ranked as the biggest launch of any videogame in history. Within its first 24 hours of release, the game sold 6.5 million units in North America and the UK, earning $400 million dollars and well on its way to over $1 billion. “We believe the launch of ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3′ is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories,” claimed Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision. By contrast, the all-time single-day movie gross record belongs to the latest installment of Harry Potter, which took in $91 million earlier this year.

Some may cry foul about comparing higher-priced games to movie ticket prices, but videogames have always cost more, and it has been only in the last few years that they have consistently challenged the dominance of feature animation grosses. Activision’s accomplishment provides an ideal moment to reflect on the growing influence of game companies like Activision and Electronic Arts on the animation community as a whole.

Some ideas to consider:
* Animation has become an integral component of contemporary games in a way that it wasn’t twenty years ago, and the quality of a lot of game animation surpasses anything you’d see in an animated TV series (not to mention some features).

* Using similar toolsets and production pipelines, game creators have achieved success by pursuing a vastly different aesthetic sensibility than traditional CG features.

* More animators in the US are likely employed in the gaming industry than are in feature animation.

All of this points to a paradigm shift taking place throughout the animation industry in which gaming is emerging as the preeminent form of cartoon entertainment. The effect that this will have on feature animation—the medium’s most prestigious format—remains to be seen over the next few decades. Perhaps animated features will begin to look more like games (an idea that filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has promoted) or perhaps they’ll push further in the opposite direction. It’s about to get interesting.

58 Comments »   posted in Business, Games, Ideas/Commentary, Activision, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

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Disney Chief Bob Iger Plans to Step Down

October 11, 2011 5:49 am

Bob Iger, we hardly knew ye. Last Friday, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that he will step down as chief executive in 2015. Prior to that, Iger will add the title of executive chairman in March 2012, and will remain in that role until June 2016, at which time he will retire from the company at the age of 65. The announcement of his impending departure was a surprise to the business world, but according to the Wall Street Journal’s analysis, the decision to also make him executive chairman “was a sign the board is eager to lock Mr. Iger in for a significant period of time, while also assuring an orderly transition when he departs.”

The paper reports that the top two candidates to replace him in 2015 are Thomas Staggs, who used to be the company’s chief financial officer and now runs the theme park division, and Jay Rasulo, who used to run the theme park division and currently is the company’s chief financial officer. As for Iger, the WSJ suggests that he has “often privately expressed interest in government and politics,” but that “politics isn’t the only option Mr. Iger is considering.”

27 Comments »   posted in Business, Disney, Bob Iger, Jay Rasulo, Thomas Skaggs

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The Cautionary Tale of Fatkat Animation

October 4, 2011 8:13 am

Depending on how you look at it, this is either an inspirational story about an animator’s resilience in the face of adversity or an infuriating indictment of his financial irresponsibility. The New Brunswick Business Journal offers the cautionary tale of Gene Fowler and his defunct Canadian animation studio Fatkat Animation. We posted about Fatkat’s closure back in 2009, but there are plenty of fresh details in this article.

The short version: Miramichi-based Fatkat was considered a major success story in Canadian business during the 2000s, and at its height employed over 100 people doing service work primarily for animated TV shows. But, as it’s made clear by the article, the studio’s growth wasn’t organic, and was made possible only through nearly $3 million in loans and Canadian taxpayer-backed funding. When the flow of government money stopped in 2009, Fowler claimed bankruptcy to the tune of $2 million.

Fowler, who is now 35 years old, defends himself in the piece: “A lot of people in Miramichi – in my own hometown – think that I just closed down that company and have a million dollars in my bank account. Truth be told, I went broke trying to keep that company alive. . . .If people think that I pocketed a bunch of government money in an offshore bank account or something like that, then hey, they can live those fantasies, because I certainly can’t.”

After Fatkat’s demise, Fowler launched a new studio Loogaroo, which is still in operation today. He’s doing it the hard way this time—without government money—and after two years, the article reports that the company is profitable, although Fowler works predominantly with freelancers and “there are no employees per se.”

21 Comments »   posted in Business, Canada, Fatkat, Gene Fowler

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Aardman Tackles Batman and WB Animation’s Moribund State

October 4, 2011 5:27 am

During last Sunday’s keynote speech at MIP Jr, Sam Register, the exec vp of creative affairs at Warner Bros. Animation, revealed that they have teamed up with Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run) to create stop motion Batman shorts.

The rest of Register’s depressing keynote is about Warner Bros. Animation’s short-sighted (but typical) brand management strategy of exclusively resuscitating old properties instead of encouraging fresh talent to develop the next generation of concepts and characters. In Register’s own words, “Currently we have nothing in the pipeline that is original. We are not taking any pitches, because we are busy. I get a lot of calls to meet or see new properties. I can’t.”

This is the video of Register’s entire speech:

(via Mayerson on Animation)

36 Comments »   posted in Business, Comics, Shorts, Stop Motion, Aardman Animations, Batman, Sam Register, Warner Bros.

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Hand-Drawn Animation Tops Box Office for 1st Time since 2009

September 19, 2011 2:45 am

Disney’s re-release of The Lion King in 3-D defied both box office expectations and the downward trend of 3-D by taking over the American box office last weekend with a FINAL total of $30.2 million. 3D screenings of the film accounted for an impressive 92% of the gross. The 1994 feature, which remained the highest-grossing hand-drawn feature of all-time even before this re-release, is the first number one hand-drawn animated feature at the American box office since the theatrical run of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog, which held the top position on December 11-13, 2009 with with $24.2M.

59 Comments »   posted in 3-D, Business, Feature Film, Lion King, The Lion King

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Four Theories on the Death of 3-D

September 16, 2011 3:24 am

Slate offers four theories on (what they’re calling) the “death of 3-D.” The article points out that theater screens showing Cars 2 in 3-D earned 5 percent less than theater screens showing the same film in 2-D, reflecting an industry-wide downward spiral in 3-D grosses that has been happening all summer long. And if I understood the article correctly, Kung Fu Panda 2 earned 65% less on a per-screen basis from 3-D showings than 2-D versions. Based on this information, it would be reasonable to assume that the sequel to Kung Fu Panda wouldn’t have earned $50 million less than the original in the US if the film had been shown in 2-D only.

All this, and to think that it was only 16 months ago that 3-D was the future of filmmaking:

47 Comments »   posted in 3-D, Business, Feature Film, Cars 2, Kung Fu Panda 2

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