Disney's New Film Direction & Muppets

[beaker]

Oooh, I agree with Disney dropping the Narnia series. Caspian cost $225M didn't make near the kind of money it should have or earn back its budget domestically. The first film made its bank on the title's name recognition beyond die-hard fans of the book series that know the stories well. This was a wise move for Disney and the series. Now another partner with a different strategy can partner up to create something that works for audiences and satisfies the bean counters. I see it as win-win for Narnia films of the future.

Drtooth was mentioning movie trends, and it occurred to me just HOW many teen fantasy movies riding on the coattails of Harry Potter and LOTR there has been in recent years.
The Seeker, Chronicles of Narnia, Narnia 2 Prince Caspian, Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass, Zathura, Percy Jackson, and I KNOW Im missing a zillion others.

Of course, the big thing all these miss is not having any animatronics

 

[Inward Jim]

Oooh, I agree with Disney dropping the Narnia series. Caspian cost $225M didn't make near the kind of money it should have or earn back its budget domestically. The first film made its bank on the title's name recognition beyond die-hard fans of the book series that know the stories well. This was a wise move for Disney and the series. Now another partner with a different strategy can partner up to create something that works for audiences and satisfies the bean counters. I see it as win-win for Narnia films of the future.

But if Disney hadn't felt the need to toy with the story of Prince Caspian, and hadn't gone overboard with some of the effects ...
the way both Narnia movies were shot, edited, and cut ... they were just lifeless and had no flare and no perspective. I loved the Narnia series of books and BBC movies, but the Disney take had me sleeping. They relied too much on having the Academy Award winning director of Shrek 1 and 2 (who was also the visual supervisor on the last two 90s Batman films) be the director for it. It could have been way better, but safe blaise middle-of-the-road production is what disney does when they are worried about running something into the ground. In the last ten years, they've become like Viacom and micromanaging everything.

 

[Drtooth]

Drtooth was mentioning movie trends, and it occurred to me just HOW many teen fantasy movies riding on the coattails of Harry Potter and LOTR there has been in recent years.
The Seeker, Chronicles of Narnia, Narnia 2 Prince Caspian, Spiderwick Chronicles, The Golden Compass, Zathura, Percy Jackson, and I KNOW Im missing a zillion others.

And about half of them seem to flop. That's the trouble with trends. Wasn't there also City of Ember, the Waterhorse, and stuff that didn't even see a week in theaters? The Golden Compass was an outright flop, there were other movies planned, and nothing came out of them.

 

[Inward Jim]

And about half of them seem to flop. That's the trouble with trends. Wasn't there also City of Ember, the Waterhorse, and stuff that didn't even see a week in theaters? The Golden Compass was an outright flop, there were other movies planned, and nothing came out of them.

Don't forget the biggie of recent: A Series of Unfortunate Events

 

[Telly]

I'd stand in line for tickets to a new Howard the Duck film!

 

[frogboy4]

I'd stand in line for tickets to a new Howard the Duck film!

LOL! In all seriousness, they should have always animated that. Interesting source material, but execution was all over the place. Poor Howard.

 

[Inward Jim]

LOL! In all seriousness, they should have always animated that. Interesting source material, but execution was all over the place. Poor Howard.

Marvel owns Howard the Duck, therefore Disney now has access to it ... I, too, would pay to see another Howard the Duck. As long as he's still a cigar smoking hornball.

 

[Drtooth]

Hmmm... considering the legal history of the character, I wonder if he's going to start semi-resembling Donald ever again.

I honestly feel if Disney wants to start doing Comic Book movies, they should make a Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck 2-D animated feature. Or some sort of Paperinik/Duck Avenger film or DTV. But they probably wouldn't. Really a shame, actually. The Disney Duck-a-verse is so expansive and there's just so much untapped potential for a great project. Other than Ducktales, they never really gave it anything outside the comics.

 

[Vic Romano]

My seven year old nephew loves Bakugan. The toys are cool looking, and the concept seems fun, but good Lord they're expensive.

Howard The Duck for me has a shinier legend then reality. I watched it again about two months ago, all excited and fanboyish, and thought, "Man, this really was terrible."

 

[Drtooth]

As a fan of anime (who likes it no more or less than any other country's animation in general) stuff like Bakugan annoys me. I have no problem with toy or video game based animes if they're at least of a decent quality. The whole Pokemon/Yugioh aspects of certain animes, the fact that the characters are all very much old cliches and stereotypes, ones that aren't even thinly veiled and they just pollute the market with identical shows with slight changes to incorporate whatever toy they're trying to sell. It's the only kind of anime American companies want to acquire (all the red tape is an utter annoyance on all sides), since they are basically just used to sell toys. And frankly, any anime out there CAN sell toys, not just ones that were toys to begin with (Look at how profitable DBZ was for the toys alone), but we always get stuck with the low quality kind. And even some of the good ones that could sell toys fall into the cultural differences gap.

As for Howard the Duck, I just call it why no one got the hang of doing a comic book movie until the turn of last century. The comics are good enough to warrant some sort of adaption... just... it wasn't wise to try it before people knew there was a real market. It was made, after all, at a time when a bunch of long forgotten movies based on popular Marvel characters happened. Now, they exist only for people to watch ironically, ala Mystery Science Theater.