Original Animation, a Loss Leader for Streaming and Sequels

Plus: A not-quite-‘Bond’ assignment!

Elio. (Courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)

The indispensable Richard Rushfield of the always-great The Ankler highlighted the absolutely dire state of original animation in his column this week. You should read the whole thing, but I’m going to steal his (before-the-paywall) hard work and crib the numbers he put together on the last few years of original animated movies:

Here is the complete list of these titles with their domestic opening weekend totals and worldwide grosses.

Elemental (2023): $29 million opening, $496 million total

Migration (2023): $12 million opening, $300 million total

Encanto (2021): $27 million opening, $261 million total (hybrid release)

Wish (2023): $19 million opening, $254 million total

Onward (2020: $39 million opening, $141 million total

Raya and the Last Dragon: $9 million opening, $130 million total (hybrid release)

Strange World (2022): $12 million opening, $74 million total

Ruby Gilman: Teenage Kraken (2023): $16 million opening, $46 million total

Elemental is the least dire of these results, in no small part because it was actually a pretty nice little story about family and had some interesting character design.¹ But all in all, this is a devastating list, just hundreds of millions in losses all stacked up on top of each other.

Animation in general isn’t a total disaster area, of course. It’s just that the wins are concentrated in sequels and IP exploitation, flicks like Inside Out 2 and The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which had audiences raring to go. But cartoons have become a bit like the franchise tentpole business: An animated movie has to be an event, and one people are familiar with, to get families to show up in theaters.

And that’s because of streaming. I’m sorry, it’s almost entirely because of streaming. You train audiences to stay in, to pay you a monthly fee to access everything, and it’s going to take an event, something big and bold, to get them off the couch, away from free snacks, and into the movie theater. Taking the family to the movies is expensive, it just is. (And look, it’s still a good deal! It’s cheaper than, say, going to a baseball game or a concert or an amusement park. But you’re still looking at at least $40 to $50 for tickets to a matinee, plus another $40 for snacks. You’re looking at a hundred bucks. That’s not nothing!)

I don’t see how the studios turn this around. But I do think there’s something worth considering: It might be a good idea to just suck it up and lose money on every theatrical original from now on.

I was discussing this with JVL in another forum and he made the case for original animation as a loss leader, and that strikes me as completely correct. You make a movie, you put it in theaters, and you hope to recoup your advertising budget. The movie then, hopefully, becomes a hit on streaming, turning into something they watch over and over again (the Encanto path) which you can, in the future, potentially monetize with sequels, spinoffs, merch, and, in the case of Disney and Universal, theme-park experiences.

Sure, you could forgo theatrical entirely—advertising ain’t cheap—but I still think putting a movie in theaters makes it “real” to people in a way that straight-to-streaming simply does not. And it makes it harder to justify dropping a sequel in theaters where it can earn Moana 2 or Minions: The Rise of Gru money. Yes, that takes time; sure, it takes the ability to absorb some losses on stuff like Elio or Turning Red. But eventually, hopefully, the investment pays off and you land a unicorn.

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F1: The Movie review

And look: pulsing score, star power, whatever. Kosinski shoots the races up close and personal, making good use of the IMAX aspect ratio and putting audiences in the cockpit alongside Sonny and JP. It’s almost overwhelming, at times, just power cinema that makes you feel as though you’re jostling with the guys on the track. Again, I don’t really care about F1—there are references aplenty in this movie that went a mile over my head—but I do like fast cars and I do like the sensation of being inside them while they go fast. F1: The Movie cost a reported $300 million and you can see the money on the screen in the form of real cars really flying around real tracks. Whatever the film lacks in human drama—and, honestly, it’s pretty rote—it makes up for in asphalt-scorching bombast.

Click here for the full review.

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Danny Boyle Fans, Unite!

This is a bonus episode for paying members of Bulwark+; we can’t give it all away for free. If you’re not already a member and you’d like to listen, click the button below:

On the main episode this week, we debated whether Boyle is right to say that no white director should make a movie like Slumdog Millionaire these days, and we reviewed 28 Years Later. You can add Across The Movie Aisle’s regular episodes to your podcast player of choice here:

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How the Zombie Apocalypse Can Help You Pass Poli Sci 101

Follow Bulwark Goes To Hollywood to your player of choice:

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Assigned Viewing: The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Netflix)

‘The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ (MovieStillsDB)

News came down this week that Denis Villeneuve was taking the reins of the Bond franchise. This is a perfectly acceptable choice—Villeneuve is a solid steward of franchise fare and has made a number of films I quite like, as well as a couple (like Sicario and Arrival) that I love—but I can’t help but feel as though we missed out on Guy Ritchie, of Snatch and The Gentlemen fame, not getting the nod.

But you can watch the next-best-thing to a Ritchie Bond movie: The Man from U.N.C.L.E., his 2015 adaptation of the Cold War-era TV show starring Henry Cavill as a CIA agent, Armie Hammer as a KGB agent, and Alicia Vikander as the moll stuck in the middle. It’s stylish and charming, even if Cavill and Hammer probably should’ve switched roles, with Hammer playing the suave American and Cavill playing the brooding Russian.

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Bonus Assigned Viewing: ‘The Galactic Civil War’

I linked to this ten-year-old mashup of Star Wars and Ken Burns in Bulwark Goes to Hollywood this week, but my colleague Catherine Lowe demanded I send it out to all of you here as well. (I assume mostly to humiliate me by showing how terrible I looked ten years ago.) Come for the hilarious idea, but stay for my terrible Shelby Foote impression.

1. Unaddressed in Richard’s list of reasons these movies failed is the fact that none of them really looks all that good? I just don’t like the visual aesthetic of nearly any of them; Elemental is probably closest to the sort of visual creativity that makes animation such a wonder to watch. Too many of them—like Turning Red, Ruby Gillman, and Strange World—feature characters that resemble formless, gloopy curves. Nothing in that run matches the character designs of Up, Wall*E, The Incredibles, or Monsters, Inc., which perfectly matched form and function.