Disney's New Film Direction & Muppets

[frogboy4]

Scan down to the last paragraph in this new article.

This is so cynical, but it's where Disney is heading. They're only making films on the cheap or blockbuster franchise pieces. It seems they still have faith in the Muppets. We'll see. It also appears they will want to blitz us with Muppet items!

 

[matleo]

So the film has producers lined up. that's a good sign.

--Matt

 

[Drtooth]

This is so cynical, but it's where Disney is heading. They're only making films on the cheap or blockbuster franchise pieces. It seems they still have faith in the Muppets. We'll see. It also appears they will want to blitz us with Muppet items!

It really doesn't say anything about the Muppets, and I severely doubt with the media blitz and all these new products they'd give it the shaft. That's just not good business sense not to try and make back their investment. Even if the movie were to (perish the the thought) not do too well, the Muppets are a great enough franchise to continue to sell merchandise and have other side projects.

In all honesty, the article pretty much said "The sky is blue" to me. Obviously, when you're in a recession (which we have to mention 80 times a day so shaky, greedy investors can pull their money out of the stock market) the big companies actually care that they're losing a small amount of money, and find ways to screw everyone until they get it back in the short run. But I'm not going there. If Disney thinks they're going to have another POTC on their hands, let them make a bunch more films based on rides. They'll all be like Haunted Mansion. People seem to forget, for every Avatar, you'll see 5 Terminator Salvations.

I think the bottom line is, if it doesn't sell toys, then it's not going to make money. Complete bull, considering UP was lacking in merchandise and G-Force had a poor selling peg warmer action figure line. If the Muppets didn't lend themselves well to t-shirts and plush dolls and stuff, then I'd worry.

 

[RedPiggy]

People seem to forget, for every Avatar, you'll see 5 Terminator Salvations.

Ouch, LOL. For every typical tree-hugging movie, you'll see five philosophically-profound-but-badly-done movies.

 

[Drtooth]

Ouch, for every big budget movie that stands at the top of the box office, 5 big budget ultra-bombs that they can't even give the merchandise away for. Go into to any Marshall's or A. J. Wright... they have ALL this TS stuff that doesn't even sell at deep discount prices.

If they ever go to the dollar stores, I plan to buy a whole bunch of them and basically play Sid from Toy Story with them. Yet, Monsters VS Aliens was a TRU exclusive.

I really wanted a Steven Colbert president figure.

 

[RedPiggy]

ROFL! Good one!

 

[Mupp]

Stop fighting!

 

[Inward Jim]

not surprising.
They'd do better to put out quality films instead putting the entire weight behind name power. The bigger news seems to be who wrote the script, who directed it, and who was the star than if it was a good film.
There are plenty of good scripts passed around Hollywood all the time. They don't get the greenlight for a number of reasons. A big one being that any time there is a regime change, the new regime's first priority is to make sure that nothing the last one greenlit gets made.
Prime example: The original script for the first X-Men movie was great, but didn't focus on Wolverine and Rogue as much. One Fox exec let it leak that the character Rogue was only put in the film because another exec's daughter liked the "one with the white streak in her hair."
Scarlet Johannsen originally read for Black Widow in the new Iron Man sequel and was told basically "not in this lifetime." Backroom meetings happened, and two weeks later she was cast.
If they didn't make decisions on such arbitrary whims, they may not have anything to really worry about.
I wish I could be hopeful about a new Muppet film, but in a day and age where the toy line can be designed before there's even a film ... I just don't know ... they'll still get my money from it, which in the end is all they care about - not whether or not I liked it. ~ sigh ~

 

[Vic Romano]

In Hollywood terms, simply the buzz about the Muppets seem to be a very good thing. I'm warmly reminded of Kermit dressing up as a movie producer in MTM pushing his script, lol!

This article brings up the idea though that we will see some new merchandise when the new movie does come out though. I agree, Up had barely any merch, and what was out was disappointing, but bad merch I suppose is better then no merch.

However, it does surprise me how a hugely successful movie like Avatar can have such bad merchandise. The game was really terrible, and the action figures are a joke. NOTHING is to scale, and that bothers the crap out of me. Same with Wall•e. Every figure was the exact same size! Grr!

 

[Drtooth]

This article brings up the idea though that we will see some new merchandise when the new movie does come out though. I agree, Up had barely any merch, and what was out was disappointing, but bad merch I suppose is better then no merch.

However, it does surprise me how a hugely successful movie like Avatar can have such bad merchandise. The game was really terrible, and the action figures are a joke. NOTHING is to scale, and that bothers the crap out of me. Same with Wall•e. Every figure was the exact same size! Grr!

It's all the Wal*Mart factor... Frogboy mentioned it somewhere else... but they just want cheap plastic pieces of junk that barely resemble the characters from the movie that cost pennies to make and sell for 10+ bucks for 6 year olds to play with for 3 minutes and toss into the corner or the trash. The collector friendly market for AF isn't dead, but it's very close.

As for Up, Disney (and possibly Pixar) wanted to keep the merchandise aspects low possibly because they were burnt by Ratatouille. Now, I don't want a Paradise Falls action Playset or a version of the Spirit of Adventure Blimp that transforms into a robot for no apparent reason... i just want the figurine set to be available in every store.