How did Polar Express fail? It seemed to do well commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polar_Express_(film)#Box_office
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Video Game Cinematics make me sad about the missed potential of CG Animation in Hollywood
- Thread starter Geist
- Start date
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Polar_Express_(film)#Box_office
What returns to the studio coffers from box office receipts in the US vary between 40-60%, and foreign receipts are between 20-35%. And that upper end is only achievable by AAAA muscle like Disney/Star Wars. For lower profile films, or without the negotiation/strongarm tactics from the hypercorps, the very low end of that scale applies. The high end is very rarely achieved.
So lets split the difference and say 50% domestic, 27.5% foreign :
That ends up with about 127m returns.
Now lets say they got the full Disney split (normally these returns slip rapidly week-on-week as the film ages, as they want to tilt the scales towards the theatres so they keep it on screens rather than kicking it for a newer competing release).
With the Disney-level splits : 155m returns.
Raw budget of the film : ~165M. Now add marketing, studio overhead for non-directly-related but still necessary expenditures just keeping the doors open (compare this to say calculating the profit per burger at a snack stand purely on food cost and employee hours, but not adding the rent/utilities/insurance with that number).
It gets into voodoo with "Hollywood Accounting", when they creatively claim hugely popular films are financially not profitable for various reasons such as taxation, or underhanded ways of not paying profit % in contracts to various parties if applicable.
With the Polar Express, it's more raw though : the thing just didn't make the kind of box office they wanted/needed to make a 165M budget profitable. If it was a world where the studio owned 100% of theaters and didn't have any overhead whatsoever with any theatre-related operations, then the full "box office" would come to them as gross. But as noted above, the splits are massively lower. You can safely say you need to have around double the domestic box office to be reasonably successful, and ideally much more than that.
This can lean a bit in extreme situations, such as a low budget film which fails at the box office, but ends up selling a crapton of DVDs or gets heavy TV licensing. Office Space is an example of this. Or, a film which just about breaks even at box office, but sells a crapton of merchandising. Etc.
Anyway, I recommend doing some reading on the subject, it's pretty fascinating to look at, both the surprising successes, and the staggering failures. The Polar Express is far from a mega disaster, but it probably lost well into the tens of millions overall.
Dude you should totally finish it.
The end of that movie is fucking bonkers.
Shit goes fucking crazy.
Sci-fi/Fantasy action films are all basically CG movies already, but when I look at the trailers and cutscenes posted here I do notice that having the humans and settings be CG too makes it look a lot more consistent.
Doesn't matter how good the graphics get, CG is going to look unreal because the things its representing are going to be unreal. But if you make the humans and settings a little unreal too, it all comes together better.
Doesn't matter how good the graphics get, CG is going to look unreal because the things its representing are going to be unreal. But if you make the humans and settings a little unreal too, it all comes together better.
I enjoyed Kingsglaive, but let's not pretend it was high art. The story jumps all over the place, and does a very poor job of explaining what the hell is going on to anyone besides the XV devout.
You can have the best CG in the industry, but it won't help if you have a crappy script. (Then again, Avatar...)
They were fighting on top of giant fighting monsters it was NUTS. Shit was flying off of handles.
Nothing really makes sense unless you're really, really into the FFXV lore. I am not. Two thirds of that movie was utter nonsense. But that end, oh my god.
Oh yeah, it's a great spectacle, but... imagine if it'd had a really tight, engrossing script. Flesh out the Kingsglaive more, spend maybe 10 minutes tops fleshing out Insomnia and the conflict with Niflheim.
Reading those numbers, it is a pity that this Hungarian 160 minute adult animated movie took 23 years to make due to production and finance difficulties (1988-2011).
I actually think these movies would do alot better now thanks to my generation being at an age where we can have income
That's the flip side of things. Hollywood is huge on trends, so as people that might have grown up really liking some of these might find themselves in position to get one made. And if it hits big-time, then it could truly open doors, and reverse the negative view.
The use of cinematics to tell the story in D2 was incredible. It's really pathetic how trash D3 cinematics were by comparison.