Flushed Away

[rexcrk]

I saw it yesterday and it WAS a pretty good movie! Definitely not as good as Chicken Run but still good. I was kind of put off by the CGI, it's too bad they couldn't have just CGI'd the water effects, I don't know how hard that would have been though.

[slave2moonlight]

I haven't seen this yet, but I did get the set of toys from McDonald's and they are awesome!

[2099net]

I may be stupid but can anyone explain this:

http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/6527

Flushed Away has earned approximately $175 million worldwide, which would be impressive if the film didn’t cost around $149 million to make. The movie was released on home video just last week but DreamWorks isn’t expecting sales to mirror those of its last feature, Over The Hedge.

$149m? How the heck? A quick look at IMDB shows this is about right (they estimate $143m). However, Wallace and Gromit is listed as costing $30m.

How can Flushed Away cost over $100m more than Wallace and Gromit?

Is this what happens when you have films made in the US?

[dvdjunkie]

I would think that part of that increase is because "Flushed Away" was a 100% CGI movie where "Wallace & Gromit" was mostly stop-motion animation which is a lot cheaper to do in more ways than CGI.

[2099net]

I would think that part of that increase is because "Flushed Away" was a 100% CGI movie where "Wallace & Gromit" was mostly stop-motion animation which is a lot cheaper to do in more ways than CGI.

Well, I wouldn't have thought so at this point in time. It took 6 years and at least 250 people to actually film Wallace and Gromit, not to mention building multiple models, character, sets, physical lighting, computer controlled motion cameras etc. Wallace and Gromit also used various CGI effects and additions (fog, water, bunnies...)

I wouldn't have thought a fully CGI film would have cost 4 times the amount of that to be honest. Not when PDI are already set-up and running.

I assume PDI have worked out most of the software (although of course there's bound to be constant revisions, but nothing drastic - the fingerprint technology was developed for W&G), and the actual computers are all bought and paid for. So the only major cost is building the virtual props and characters and animating them.

I don't know, it just seems a bit rich for Dreamworks to be blaming Aardman for their financial failure, when most of the expense seems to be incurred by Dreamworks/PDI themselves!

[dvdjunkie]

netty you are reading too much into this. No one is blaming anyone for the failure of "Flushed Away", it just didn't do as well in the US as they projected. A lot of that cost could have been promotion and advertising (which is not cheap) and also television advertising. Remember a lot of the cost of the movies today is in the promotion and advertising.

I think you are way too technical for you own good. You use terms like PDI which I wouldn't know from Adam, and they can't use previous set-ups for a Computer Generated subject that were once Claymation-made for stop-motion animation. There are different costs. If this movie was made in the US then yes there will be an increase in the cost of making the movie because of Unions, and job assignments, which are totally different from what they use in the European market.

Who really cares how much money a movie makes. I never let that sway my liking of or disliking of any movie. I think Dreamworks SKG is doing a bang-up job with their animation releases, and maybe the US wasn't ready for an Aardman co-production like this one.

[James]

I would also blame the release date. I don't know when it was released in the US, but here in Australia, it was released around Xmas, when Charlottes Web and Happy Feet were too, meaning that it lost out big time to them, especially since more families would take them to see those two over Flushed Away. I think that it would've done much better a bit earlier in the year, perphaps September/October or even August, and maybe would've done better in just clay-mation. It wasn't special enough in CGI to garner families to go and see it. From a parents persepctive, Flushed Away was just another CGI flick, in the vein of Open Season, etc. and they would much rather watch a nice family film (Charlottes Web) or a spectcular fun flick with a relevant message (Happy Feet).
I personally haven't seen it, but I do wish to. It seems really good, from what I've seen. It sucks that it didn't do as well as what they hoped for.
-James

[Escapay]

Who really cares how much money a movie makes.

The investors.

Escapay

[littlefuzzy]

According to the IMDB boards, Flushed Away had some creative accounting going on... (like other films...)

Basically, if a secretary spent 5 minutes typing something related to a film like Flushed Away, her entire salary would be counted, for the entire period the film was in production, and so forth...

Evidently, there is a lawsuit going on about this on other films, and a judge ordered an independent accounting firm to look at the books, where they found stuff like the above mis-use...

The studios would claim that the movie didn't make any money, and wouldn't pay royalties to the creators...