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GelflingWaldo
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Well, the film had it's problems. Here's a quote from an interview with Brian Henson where he states what went wrong with Muppets From Space:
"Well, I think Muppets From Space suffered from two things. One, which was certainly our fault, was that the film was probably not as strong as it could have been. The script was not as focused as it could have been, and the tone of the film meandered a little bit. Second, removing musical numbers – in hindsight – was probably a bad idea. I would say there were flaws in the film, but we also got clobbered by a disconnect from inside of Sony, where the distribution department loved the Muppets – and the distribution department wanted to go out in summer, against the biggest films, and wanted to make a huge hit. Early on, I had said to them, "We're used to releasing Muppet movies in the off-season, not on the on-season. We've always done well that way." They said, "No, we're going to knock it out of the park. We're going to go summer, and do a big summer hit." That was the way distribution felt – marketing didn't feel that way at all, so marketing gave us a marketing plan that was smaller than the plans that we ever worked off of with Disney, and yet we were in a summer rush. There was no marketing.
When we opened the film, there was still only like less than half of the audience who even knew it was in theaters, which is kind-of catastrophic for any movie. That's a week-and-a-half of your business right there. The marketing didn't get to the audience at all. That's why those big summer movies spend an enormous amount of money – because they have to catch families who aren't watching television, who aren't on a regular routine... They're on a summer routine, so you've got to catch them on the way to the beach, you've got to catch them at the restaurants, you've got to catch them at the theme parks, you've got to catch them on their boating holidays – you've got to catch them every way you can. Basically, we didn't do that at all. They used an off-season marketing plan that was not going to work in the school holidays. We really suffered a disconnect over at Sony. Having said all that, the film had its problems, too. Definitely."
However, focusing back to Fraggle Rock -- the Fraggle Rock feature film does not have a distributor or co-producer lined up yet (and from what I've been told, an initial draft of a script for the film isn't even completed yet). Wikipedia, IMDB and other user-edited sites have been adding claims (often of Disney involvement) based on assumptions (often due on ignorant thinking that Disney own the Henson Co. now or that they bought the Fraggles with the Muppets). That's not to say Henson won't end up working with Disney, or Sony, or Warner Bros, or the Weinstein Co, or Fox, or Universal, or Odyssey Entertainment, or Dreamworks, or whoever. But no official deal has been signed yet. There is still a lot of business work that has to be done before production can really take off. It will hopefully all things will be ready for production to ramp up next year with release still in-line for 2009 -- although a lot of the "hold up" and focus right now comes from hammering out the script and developing a quality story.
