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Dreamworks Dumps Wallace and Gromit
Tiger4 writes "Aardman Animation and Dreamworks are splitting their relationship. Apparently Dreamworks feels they lost money on 'Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were Rabbit' and 'Flushed Away.' So off to their separate ways they go. Aardman is going back to stop motion and clay, Dreamworks will be staying with their CGI ways." In addition, Aardman Animation announced that a new Wallace and Gromit film is in the works.
good riddance to CG where it's neither needed nor wanted.
Sorry, but Dreamworks is just a name now. SKG sold out quite awhile ago.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Oh well Gromit lets have a cup of tea and a nice bit of cheese. The UK still loves you Ardman
...when winning an Oscar just isn't enough.
What luck for rulers that men do not think. - Adolf Hitler
I never liked Shrek, and always loved Wallace and Gromit, so I am happy to see Aardman moving away from Dreamworks. Perhaps Pixar and Disney could work with them?
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
If "Tottie" is in the next movie, I'm getting it for sure. What a doll ;-)
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/40707000/jpg /_40707970_w3.jpg
"...everybody knows Hollywood's made of cheese".
"They're crackers! We've forgotten they're crackers!"
"No more Americans -- more trouble than they're worth! I could just fancy some cheese, Gromit. What do you say? Cheddar?... All's well that ends well, that's what I say. Uhmm... I do like a bit of gorgonzola..."
"It's the wrong company Gromit. And they've gone wrong"
Plus raised eyebrows and a pained look from Gromit of course!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Isn't this a suitable candidate for the "haha" tag?
Ah, to live during the peak of capitalism.
The best two animated films Dreamworks put out since Toy Story and they're dropping the production company? I guess we can look forward Shark Tale 2: Out of Water, Farther Over the Hedge and Madagascar II: Kung Fu Panda (one of those is actually the real name for a planned sequel). Didn't Were Rabbit win a freakin' Oscar?
I loved the film. I reccomended it to all my geeky animation fan pals and I bought the DVD.
Exactly how unprofitable was it? Does anyone have the figures? Ballpark numbers even?
If you see a rock violating the law of gravity, then the law is wrong, not the rock!
I'm not a huge fan of animated kid movies, but I rather liked Flushed Away. It's sad that it didn't do well enough for the duo to do more movies.
You're nothing; like me.
Watching Wallace and Gromit is what made french class tolerable!
insight through the mind
Did any decent movie released in 2005 make money?
Anyway, "Wererabbit" was brilliant, but not noticably more so than the preceeding shorts - in fact, although I've watched the DVD several times I can't even remember whether I went to see it in the cinema or not. More half-hour shorts for TV/DVD, guys! Cinema is just a rather cost-innefective way of advertising DVDs.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Wallace and Gromit and Aardman's other work are such uniquely funny creations (notably, with the exception of the horrid Flushed Away) that I am very happy to see them separate from the marketing machine of Dreamworks. Hopefully this means we will be getting more of that subtle, relaxed British humor as opposed to try-hard material based on focus-group approval ratings that you can expect from a U.S. behemoth like Dreamworks. Not to say that the latter doesn't have its place in the entertainment industry, because it does - as has been proven by the many excellent achievements of this company - but coupled together with Aardman, there is no synergy, just mutual deprecation.
This announcement is just the "official" one. The decision to dump Aardman was made years ago when Katzenberg was frustrated by Aardman's inability to turn Tortoise & The Hare from a deeply flawed concept (a mockumentary) into something American audiences would want to see. Aardman's refusal to relinquish the merchandise rights for W&G to Dreamworks was the final straw. Since then, we've just been seeing death spasms of this relationship.
I'm not saying either party is in the wrong, but the whole deal was a disaster waiting to happen. The surprise success of Chicken Run gave everyone rose-tinted glasses. Katzenberg only ever really wanted W&G.
Maybe this has something to do with them losing all their production facilities - sets, props, etc in a fire last October.
A lot of business's don't recover well after fire, and I'd imagine a creative outfit losing most of their production assetts would find it particularly hard.
And they call Americans intolerant, lazy, fat bastards...
Should I stick a Lady Hamilton joke in there?
Katzenberg just doesn't understand Park's humour at all (he spells it humor for a start), and is responsible for just about every missed note in both Chicken Run and particularly Flushed Away. It was nice to have their cash to play with, but if it means yet more painfully compromised films which make stupid decisions in a failed attempt to appeal to Americans, then good riddance.
Now Dreamworks can go back to concentrating on dire, 'hip' CG extravaganzas with all the lasting appeal of a rotten pear.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The British psyche has long had a soft-spot for all things Aardman and their distinct style of claymation, coupled with quintessentially UKian humour. Check out this example and the many others from those unflappable blobs.
Well, not any more. I think aardman got what they needed - they became a slightly better known in america. The curse of the were-rabbit was a very funny film, but when you compare it to Aardmann's other stuff, it has some noticeable lackings. The humour isn't quite as good, and goes for the guaranteed laugh rather than the actual funny stuff.
Aardmann are an excellent creative company and the last thing they need is a company like dreamworks breathing down their back.
That said, dreamworks are good, I loved the Shrek films, but what they needed to do with aardman is just leave them alone and let them exercise their own creativeness. However, they've decided to dump them now, and I don't think that will really make much of a difference.
.sigs are for losers
Oi! You leave Neil and Christine alone, thank-you very very much!
Saucy bugger.
Actually from what I heard, the real problem was that the studios just didn't like working with eachother.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Only an American could mod this insightful.
I like muppets.
Their liaison with Dreamworks got Aardman (write it correctly, people!) through a very difficult period after their warehouse (and workplace) burnt down. Now that they're back on their feet doing a few experimental things in the US, they can go on doing things in plasticine, using British humour. I'd say praise them both !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
You lousy foreigners! I'd get up out of my Barcalounger and pound the bejesus outta you for insulting us but I'm too tired and my ankles hurt and I'd spill my bag of Cheetos and my Coke and I'd miss the game on TV. Never mind. I'm content. I don't care about transfats, global warming, or genocide. That's all for sissy liberals. Wallace and Grommit, hah! Any Hanna-Barbara is far better.
Nope. They haven't got the Scrooge McDuck-esque treasury built up yet.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
All's well that ends well, that's what I say!
(This is good enough to be exempt from redundant... isn't it? Oh please.)
Flushed Away was crap.
Anyway, the spent over $100M on it, and it only made 30-40M back.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I really can't stand that type of clay animation with the stupid looking teeth...
Ok - maybe its just the teeth that bother me. All I know is that any movie that has characters based on this "style" of clay animation is a no-go for me.
There. My $0.02
My Slashdot Journal! YAY!
What about art? Or even something interesting? I liked Farscape, which I think the Sci-Fi channel cancelled for similar reasons.
I would also say that I thiink something is lost, artistically, when digital animation is used to replace clay. Sometimes, low-tech is better. I do some oil painting on the side, and could never imagine my work being replaced by a computer or some mechanisation (such as, for example, in the "paintings" of Thomas Kinkead).
Your spelling and grammar are somewhat passé and ugly, too.
Glad to see my post modded 'flamebait'. Demonstrates there ARE some clueless people with no sense of humor or irony, which class were my target anyway. But I'm puzzled, how did Digg posters manage to get accounts on Slashdot? (cough)
Yes, because the brits have been sooooo concerned over the Darfur situation.And Brance, especially France, they've just been as attentive to the problem as could possibly be.
The bunny vac with the chamber of floating bunnies had to be done with CGI, since it was technically near impossible otherwise.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
FWIW, some of us were aware of the humour. Flamebait mod was poorly chosen.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
My only problem with Shrek, and specifically Shrek 2 was that it was totally inappropriate to advertise it to children. Now, I think that if you want to let your 8 year old watch porn, it is your right as a parent to choose what is and is not appropriate for your child, but trying to trick people into taking their kids to movies that are loaded with sex is just not right. Many people try to tell themselves that 'it goes over the kids heads'. That is just plain wrong. Pretty much every kid that watched Shrek 2 knew that Puss'n'Boots was giving himself a blowjob when the princess walked in and thought he was Shrek.
Shrek 2 is no more appropiate for children than Fritz the Cat was in 1972. That being said, I think I was 8 the first time I saw Fritz the cat. My problem isn't kids seeing it. The problem is that kids are seeing it without their parents knowing or understanding what their kids are seeing, and the producers of the movie are going out of their way to keep it that way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBFxscicJA0
Pretty much every kid that watched Shrek 2 knew that Puss'n'Boots was giving himself a blowjob when the princess walked in and thought he was Shrek.
every kid who knows cats knows what this cat was doing. He was cleaning himself in the usual odd places. This is what cats do. That is funny and that is why it's in there. The idea that the cat was doing anything else at that time never occurred to me, but of course I was never exposed to Fritz the Cat when I was 8.
And she walked out, not in. Neh!
According to the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, Dreamworks actually reported a $25-million loss on Wallace & Gromit . (If that link locks you out, the relevant quotes are in the next one.)
Since I remembered Wallace & Gromit opening at #1 and staying in the top 5 for about a month, I did the same kind of math you did, using IMDB figures. Even looking at the domestic figures, W&G pulled in $56 million -- that's $26 more than the movie's budget. I doubt they spent $50 million advertising a $30 million movie, so I really have to wonder where the money went. Factor in the overseas gross and it looks like a healthy success.
My best guess is that they charged the Flushed Away losses against Wallace and Gromit to make them look like two flops instead of one success and a flop.
I've been nothing but disappointed with Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar for quite a while - they're like autophagous cannibal machines, endlessly devouring themselves and their own Hollywood culture, vomiting up ersatz ambergris and defecating marketing material.
Disney's the worst offender, mining myths and legends in the public domain since the dawn of their existence, keeping everything and giving nothing back, extending copyright law into infinity to protect their stupid fucking Mouse. I'm glad they're mostly eating themselves, now.
Curse of the Were-Rabbit had a lot of pop culture references, but never lost itself. The Iron Giant was an incredible film, but I can't say I liked the Incredibles in the same way. Both were comparatively unsuccessful.
People love crap.
For 'Rabbit' and 'Flushed' you can bet that better than half the stated budget went to Dreamworks for promotion and management fees, and making sure 'those Brits did it right' leaving less than half for Ardman to actually make the film.
"Curse of the Were-Rabbit" will probably go down as the world's first and last thirty million dollar clay animation film.
Don't take it personally if Flushed Away didn't get the same box office that other movies in that market usually do. They did the full marketing job on it, complete with MacDonalds and Breakfast Cereal tie-ins. Fortunately, this shouldn't affect their ability to continue producing films.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Those figures may look convincingly positive, but actually the film probably hasn't made a profit yet.
Gross box office takings are the money taken at the box office, and any profit is shared between the exhibitor (the cinema), the distributor, and the production companies and the taxman takes from all of them.
Moreover, the figure of 30 mill is likely to be what the industry terms the "negative cost" (that's negative as in film negative, not bad karma). This is the cost of making the film up to the point of having an actual negative. It doesn't include making prints, marketing, funding executives' cocaine habits or other costs not directly related to making the film. So of the money that goes to the production company, not all of it will amortise the negative cost. If the gross takings figure includes international sales, then they'll be other costs and an even larger number of companies to split the money between.
The net result is that absolutely NO film will make money at the cinema, even ones with seemingly spectacular box office receipts. Profit for a film technically comes when the negative cost is paid off, often a number of years down the line, from DVD sales and TV sales.
Conquest's 3rd Law: Every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents.
I was gravely disapointed by Were Rabbit (there goes my "friend" status with MsGeek :( ). It was well made, technically, but I could have done without all of the Benny Hill-esque jokes in it. It felt like they were trying too hard to make it adult enough for the parents in the audiance.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
According to this article, the movie was singled out as a reason for Dreamworks' improved performance in 2006.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
A perfect example of this is Chicken Run - the American actors and horrible script made this one unwatchable to this Wallace and Grommit fan.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
...this means that a profit is a negatively negative profit (Profit = --Profit). Furthermore, a profit is equal to the RMS negative profit (Profit = sqrt((-Profit * -Profit)/1). Worst of all, the profit was exponentially logarithmic (Profit = log(exp(Profit)))!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)