Category: Disney News

Ed Catmull is behind three decades of sustained success for Pixar. Picture: Deborah Coleman

Hollywood studios wax and wane, rise and sometimes disappear. Every studio has its moment and if it’s lucky this can last for a decade. Pixar’s has lasted three decades.

So successful has Pixar Animation Studios been since its debut with the first fully computer-rendered feature film, Toy Story, in 1995 that Pixar as a brand name stands for something in quality, style and values that also upends auteur theory. The studio collective is the auteur delivering success after success.

Ed Catmull was there at the start, a computer scientist recruited by George Lucas from the New York Institute of Technology to head ­Lucasfilm’s computer division, before joining John Lasseter and Steve Jobs to form the independent company Pixar in 1986.

After multiple hits (including Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) the 1200-­employee company was sold to the Walt Disney Company in 2006 for $US7.4 billion, and Catmull has served as president of Pixar as well as the Walt Disney Animation Studios (with Lasseter as chief creative officer of both) ever since.

The broader “moment” for Disney now incorporates the franchise freight trains of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars, although Catmull and Lasseter’s reinvigoration of Disney’s animation division is one of the great Hollywood turnarounds.

They have lifted the “Mouse House” from a low base and celebrate their 10th anniversary with the release this month of Disney Animation’s latest, Zootopia, which has smashed box office records in North America and, surprisingly, China, becoming the highest-grossing animated film there in just two weeks.

Catmull says the film marks a satisfying anniversary, given the circumstances. “When we first started there,” he says, “Disney Animation itself didn’t mean much because it hadn’t produced much for a while.”

That is an understatement. A decade ago, the cartoon house that Walt built was spluttering with bomb after bomb. The studio behind Mickey Mouse, Dumbo, The Lion King, The Lady and the Tramp, Fantasia, Aladdin and the rest released a bunch of animated features from 2002 that now serve as a list of films you didn’t see:Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, The Emperor’s New Groove, Home on the Range,Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons and so on.

Then Catmull and Lasseter arrived with their Pixar credo that it be a “filmmaker-driven studio”, not a management-driven one.

“Almost immediately we started making films that were reviewed well [including Bolt and The Princess and the Frog] but [initially] they weren’t drawing in the crowds,” Catmull recalls.

“Then Tangled [a musical adaptation of the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel tale] got both the critical and the commercial success, but it was followed the next year with [CGI animated video game parody] Wreck-It Ralph, and it was confusing people because they thought: why is Disney making a Pixar film?”

Meanwhile, Pixar made the female-focused adventure Brave, raising the converse but apposite question: why is Pixar making a Disney film? “So there was confusion about it, and then Frozen came out,” Catmull says.

Yes, Frozen. It and Tangled featured female leads in rich, beautiful new worlds that fit perfectly the mould of classic Disney animation. Frozen corrected the dialogue about Disney and did what the very best family films do. It became a cultural phenomenon and its lead tune, Let It Go, became as pervasive as Titanic’s My Heart Will Go On. And it earned $US1.2bn in cinemas and multiples of that in ancillary markets and merchandising.

Disney Animations Studio followed with the inventive Marvel Comic adaptation Big Hero 6 and now Zootopia. The once embattled studio is now “taken in its own way, as a studio producing great films”, Catmull says, and not as Pixar’s ugly sibling.

“Zootopia was the threshold moment,” he says. “That was the greatest feeling and this happened at 10 years.”

From afar, the 55th animated feature in Walt Disney’s Animated Classics series looks like so many kids films: it features animals voiced by a strong cast (including Jason Bateman, Idris Elba, Ginnifer Goodwin and JK Simmons). Yet the film has popped, entering the cultural consciousness of children around the world.

Catmull didn’t see it coming but “we don’t usually”, he says with a chuckle.

“What happens is we’re always struggling with a film, and of course you don’t know if it’s going to make it over the hurdle until it actually does. It wasn’t until we got close to the end that we suddenly connected a lot of dots in the last half year … and as we got close to the end I thought, ‘This one is actually really meaningful. All of the things are coming together, the voice talent works great together, the comedy works great, and the world is very rich and interesting.’

“But I have to tell you, as we crossed the last threshold it was scary,” he adds.

The tale of a rabbit who aspires to be a police officer in the utopian Zootopia, and her shaky friendship with a con artist fox, touches on contemporary concerns such as tolerance, race and bullying with a light touch.

Catmull says its timing and content makes the Disney hierarchy particularly proud. “It’s like, ‘OK, we’ve got something great and it’s the reason we make movies’,” he says.

“We want to make something which connects with culture. It’s never about ‘Let’s just make a movie’ [or] ‘Let’s just have a laugh fest’. It really is in the idea. The idea of the films we make is to leave a lasting impression and have some meaning.”

Catmull’s lasting impression is more resonant than that of other studio heads. While wrangling two studios and commuting between Pixar in San Francisco and Disney in Los Angeles each week, the 70-year-old wrote (with Amy Wallace) the very readable, and now influential, 2014 management memoir Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.

It imparts some stark advice, most of it counter to the mass of management malarky clogging business and self-help bookshelves. Catmull sighs that even its reception has bemused him because “in writing it, you come up with some conclusion and people grab on to that and the real issue is not the conclusion, it’s the thought process behind that”.

Management buzz words don’t mean anything “in terms of how people address the human nature of people’s fears”, he adds.

“Saying it is not doing it. Give me the right thing to say, people ask. There isn’t a right thing to say.”

But three decades of sustained success for Pixar and the turnaround of Disney Animation suggest he and Lasseter know the right things to do. In essence, the book says they’ve backed people and wrangled creativity for a greater good.

Yet the Pixar mavens didn’t storm into Disney and upend the place. Indeed, Catmull says, largely the same group of people at Disney Animation were there 10 years ago.

“We entered into this with an attitude of not ‘let’s see whether or not they can do it’,” he says. “It was ‘let’s assume they can do it’.”

He believed the talent was there but management stood in the way of that talent flowering, so his job was to remove barriers, make suggestions and ultimately allow Disney’s teams autonomy.

“But by providing that kind of guidance, they rose to the occasion, they figured it out and in the end they did it, and it was amazing,” he says. “And the whole feeling at the studio now is completely different. The confidence level and the joy they feel is really gratifying.”

Oddly, he and Lasseter kept the two animations houses separate when management consultants would have you consolidate, cut and find synergies. Catmull says there were reasons to keep them separated and they have subsequently enjoyed benefits “that were even beyond what we thought”.

Disney animators asked for help from Pixar animators on troublesome films but Catmull and Lasseter refrained because they didn’t want to have any element of “Pixar bailed us out” hang over any film.

“And it was important that if we turned [Disney Animation] around they had to feel like they did it,” he says.

Secondly, he didn’t want one studio to be the clone of the other.

“Whereas if you’ve got two different cultures, they’re going to do different things,” he says. And they have, he adds happily. Finally, there is an element of sharing between the two studios, but there is no requirement to do so.

Which speaks to one of Catmull’s key lessons in Creativity Inc: the removal of existential threats within companies and employees.

“There isn’t anybody saying ‘you must use best practice for this’ or ‘we’re going to save money if we all use the same pipeline or use the same tools’,” he says.

“Instead the view is that we’re stronger if the two groups are kept separate and they have different ideas and then they share the ideas and we can pick and choose from them.”

This counters economic theory to the effect that the benefits from economies of scale outweigh any from creative tension or multiple separate entities.

“I would argue that that reasoning is almost always flawed,” Catmull says.

“The economies of scale, especially in an industry that changes rapidly — which anything closely related to technology does — make it more difficult to change. It slows you down and it is a complete and utter illusion. Not only is it an illusion, it’s false.”

The two studios also have the benefit of a so-called Braintrust of senior creatives who oversee all their work. The idea developed organically from the early days at Pixar when five men led and edited the production of Toy Story — Lasseter, Andrew Stanton (dual Academy Award winner for Finding Nemo and WALL-E), Pete Docter (dual Oscar winner for Up and Inside Out), Lee Unkrich (winner for Toy Story 3), and Joe Ranft (who died in 2005).

“Initially it was Pixar teaching Disney how to do it but we only did that for a year and a half and then Disney got going,” Catmull says.

They were kept separate for years until Pixar was “a little stuck” with Inside Out. The Disney Braintrust “looked at the film and they helped pick at a problem that was in the way. As soon as we heard [their answer], we realised it was true and ‘oh, we’ve got two groups of people who like each other, they want each other to succeed, they speak the same language, they know what it means to give meaningful notes and they’re fresh eyes’.”

Later, the Pixar Braintrust found two flaws holding back Zootopia.

“Then I realised not only do we have a Braintrust, which is unique in the industry, but we have two of them,” Catmull says with a laugh. “And it gives Disney an incredible strength to have two groups, who once per film can give feedback to the other — and only once per film, because no longer are they fresh eyes.”

The same is true of the recent introduction of the Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm worlds to the Disney family.

“What you want is a sharing relationship but you don’t want a merging,” Catmull says. “It’s an important concept.”

It sounds like a creative utopia, free of ego and cost controls.

Which it is, to a point, although Catmull says he has no intention of turning his hand to a career as management guru, ­because “I have the best job in the world”.

And he remains upbeat about story­telling and the future of the traditional cinema ­experience.

“I’m optimistic in the sense that ­storytelling is the way we communicate with each other,” he says. “So if I look at that in terms of how we structure things, it’s stayed stable for a long time.”

He was recently amazed while listening to an audio book of Homer’s The Iliad, a nearly 3000-year-old oral story told in a different language, in a different culture that still resonates.

The novel form is old, cinema not so old, and we adapt our storytelling to the particular medium, he theorises. “So the storytelling is going to be here. Now the medium is going through some change, it’s pretty obvious, so what is our adaptation to it, how do we use it?” he says.

“And I think part of being nimble is to recognise that and use the things that work. There are certainly things about the three-act structure in movies that have held up because they work really well,” he adds.

The quest now is to keep the two creative ­giants under his aegis nimble as they prepare, separately, Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2, among other ventures. “That’s the hard part,” Catmull says. “In fact, if anything, it gets harder when you’ve had a number of successes in a row, so I would say internally [we’re thinking]: now we’ve got these successes, what’s the actual impact?

“The implication of success is we’re doing stuff right so people want to hang on to that. So the challenge is to get people not to cling or hang on to anything, because if you look at the world, the technology is changing, the skills set, the software is changing, expectations are changing, there is nothing stable in this environment.

“And if there’s nothing stable it becomes all-important to recognise that and then fight those forces of conservatism that fight you from making those changes. People think they’re trying to do the right thing but what they‘re actually doing is getting more stuck. And that’s the challenge: how do you keep from getting stuck?”

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Walt Disney has announced that Zootopia will cross $500 million worldwide as of today. It is the third-consecutive Walt Disney Animated Studios movie to reach said milestone, following Big Hero 6 and Frozen. And you can throw Tangled onto the pile as well, although Wreck-It-Ralph clocked out at “just” $471m back in 2012.

At this rate, the Ginnifer Goodwin/Jason Bateman/Idris Elba animated adventure will soon surpass Tangled both domestically ($200m) and worldwide ($591m) and next set its proverbial sights on the $222m domestic and $657m worldwide gross of Big Hero 6. After that, it’s basically the biggest-grossing Walt Disney animated feature ever after The Lion King and Frozen.

Yes, inflation is a big factor, but that’s something I want to dive into when I have to time to play around with Box Office Mojo’s “adjusted for inflation” calculator. But for reference, Pocahontas ($146 million in 1995) earned $283m in “adjusted for 2016” grosses.

For the moment, Zootopia has earned $163.8 million domestic after fourteen days of play (as of Thursday). It is quite likely that it will end the weekend just over the $200m mark with a possible final gross of $275-$300m depending on A) how it weathersBatman v Superman and B) to what extent Zootopia and The Jungle Book can coexist in a month’s time if Zootopia is still pulling them in.

The film has earned $335.3 million overseas alone, including $143.2m (as of today) in China alone. The film actually lost the top spot in China to the superb $10m opening day of The Revenant, but I’m sure Disney is all busted up about that. The film is days away from passing Kung Fu Panda 3 as China’s biggest animated hit ever. Including that Friday $7.4m gross from China, the film’s worldwide total is $497m thus far.

Oh, and Gods of Egypt has earned $29.2 million in China, making said territory the biggest single marketplace for said Alex Proyas fantasy.

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Disney has acquired movie rights to the fantasy series “The Chronicles of Prydain” and is in early development on the project, Variety has learned.

The five novels by Lloyd Alexander, based on Welsh mythology, were published annually from 1964 to 1968 and followed the protagonist Taran from youth to maturity. He’s an assistant pig-keeper but initially dreams of being a grand hero.

The books are set in the magical land of Prydain, which resembles ancient Wales and is engaged in a series of battles with Annuvin, the Land of Death.

Other key characters are the young princess Eilonwy, the bard Fflewddur Fflam and a wild creature named Gurgi.

The books are “The Book of Three,” “The Black Cauldron,” “The Castle Llyr,” “Taran Wanderer” and “The High King.” The final book won the John Newbery Medal, given by the Association for Library Service to Children.

Sam Dickerman is the Disney executive on the project, which has not yet been set with a producer, director or writer.

The first two books in the series served as the basis for Disney’s 1985 animated fantasy movie “The Black Cauldron,” in which a Horned King sought to secure an ancient magical cauldron that would aid him in his desire to conquer the world.

The film, directed by Ted Berman and Richard Rich, was the first Disney animated film to include computer-generated imagery. The movie, which carried a $44 million budget, failed to generate significant interest, with a $21 million domestic gross, and was not distributed as a home video release for more than a decade.

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Hollywood knows exactly what audiences need: more reboots, remakes and reimaginings.

If the response to that is an eye roll followed by an obligatory snarky comment, the numbers Hollywood executives follow suggest reboots and remakes are, at least, what audiences want.

Last year’s record-breaking box office was chock full of stories previously told on the silver screen. Two of the top five highest-grossing films of all time were reboots released in 2015: Walt Disney Co.’s DIS, +1.18% “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has grossed $930.9 million in the U.S. and “Jurassic World,” from Comcast Corp.-owned CMCSA, +1.40% Universal Studios raked in $652.3 million.

2015 film remakes and reboots
Rank Title Distributor Production budget (millions) Domestic box office gross (millions)
1 “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” Disney $200 $930.9
2 “Jurassic World” Universal Studios $150 $652.3
3 “Mad Max: Fury Road” Warner Bros. $150 $153.6
4 “Creed” Warner Bros. $35 $109.8
5 “Terminator Genisys” Paramount Pictures $155 $89.8
6 “Fantastic Four” 20th Century Fox $120 $56.1
7 “Poltergeist” 20th Century Fox $35 $47.4
8 “Pan” Warner Bros. $150 $35.1
9 “Point Break” Warner Bros. $105 $28.8
10 “Hitman: Agent 47” 20th Century Fox $35 $22.5
Total: $2.1 billion
Box Office Mojo

The argument for films like Warner Bros.’ TWX, +1.13% “Pan” or 20th Century Fox’s FOXA, +0.21% FOX, +0.00% “Fantastic Four” is that they were, subjectively, bad movies. ComScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said no matter whether a film is a remake, reboot or reimagining, a bad film is simply that.

“At the end of the day, as long as you’ve made a good movie, nobody is going to care whether it’s a remake, or whatever ‘re’ word you want to use,” Dergarabedian said. He referred back to “Jurassic World” and the apprehension people voiced when it was announced. “Now it’s one of the biggest films of all time and it was a good movie. Believe it or not, it’s not always just about the box office.”

Disney has announced it is pulling a flick from the classic film franchise industrial complex once more, thrusting Indiana Jones back into the spotlight, again. The House of Mouse, which acquired the film rights to “Indiana Jones” when it paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm in 2012, said Tuesday that Harrison Ford, director Steven Spielberg and veteran producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall will reunite for a fifth film.
“Oh this was definitely a smart move,” Dergarabedian said. “What’s old is new again and it’s been an absolute nostalgia fest at the box office in recent years.”

Viacom Inc.-owned VIA, +2.38% VIAB, +3.03% Paramount Pictures previously owned distribution and marketing rights to the “Indiana Jones” franchise, before selling them to Disney, and brought everyone’s favorite tweed-wearing professor back to the box office in 2008 with “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

“If you’ve got Spielberg and Harrison Ford back, it’s good enough for me,” Dergarabedian said. “People will follow [Spielberg] on any journey he’ll take them on… Even if ‘Crystal Skull’ isn’t on the top of any one’s list of favorite movies, it made a lot of money. And you’re lying if you say you’re not excited about [the new film].”

Despite wherever “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” sits in the zeitgeist, the film grossed $317.1 million in the U.S. and $786.6 million world-wide, on a $185 million production budget. The “Indiana Jones” franchise is one of the highest grossing franchises ever, actually. All four films have earned a combined $906.4 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
Now, the marketing and moneymaking machine that is Disney has its massive paws on the franchise and there’s no reason not to trust the brand will do right by Indy and his fan base. The studio’s most recent successes need no explanation, really: “Star Wars,” the Marvel Cinematic Universe, “Frozen” et al.

“It’s under the Disney umbrella now and it absolutely gives the franchise a very strong leg up, especially in terms of marketing,” Dergarabedian said, noting Disneyland already has an Indian Jones attraction. “They have so many moneymaking avenues and platforms to market the brands and it’s really what Disney does best.”

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With Jon Favreau’s adaptation of The Jungle Book now exactly a month away, Disney has decided to try and increase anticipation ahead of its release with a brand new minute-long trailer. And while the footage does a sterling job of introducing us to the world, characters, and the sublime cast that will be voicing them, it’s all kinds of violent. Especially since it’s supposed to be for family audiences.

Jon Favreau seems to have taken a page out of Christopher Nolan’s book with his approach to Rudyard Kipling’s seminal 1894 novel. Everything about the trailerscreams that The Jungle Book wants to be taken very, very seriously, with Bill Pope’s cinematography dripping in darkness and shadows.

Which is understandable. However there’s a chance that The Jungle Book might be alienating its intended audience with just how scary and striking some of its images and visuals are. I mean, just look at Shere Khan lunging towards the screen, which is made even more frightening by the fact that he’s voiced by Idris Elba.

And if having a Bengal Tiger roaring in your face wasn’t scary enough, how about being chased through long grass by one. The scene looks as though it’s been ripped straight out of The Lost World. Only this time, instead a raptor, it’s a talking tiger, which is umpteen times scarier.

Oh, and just to make sure that your kids will forever be petrified of long grass and the zoo, here’s Shere Khan lunging for Neel Sethi’s Mowgli only for Ben Kingsley’s Bagheera the black panther to do the equivalent of a gore on him.

And that’s before we even get to the final shot of Scarlett Johansson’s Kaa looking like she’s about to eat Mowgli’s face. We don’t have long to wait to see if Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book is preposterously too violent for its own good, as it will be released on April 15, 2016.

Where previous Disney Infinity expansions have worked within the rules and tools of the core game, the new Marvel Battlegrounds set breaks those rules, creating a Power Stone-esque competitive brawler that’s almost worthy of a standalone release.

Instead of working with the movesets the Disney Infinity team has established for its Marvel Comics characters over the past two instalments of the series, all 28 heroes and villains have been given brand new moves unique to Battlegrounds. New blocks, throws, combos and super moves make even characters players have spent hours with feel fresh and new.

In battle players run freely about various interactive stages, fighting against up to three opponents at a time. The Infinity folks like to mention Capcom’s Power Stone, and the inspiration taken from that classic is clear.

Familiar capsules filled with green health and purple super power appear randomly on the field as a fight progresses. Marvel Power Discs (from both Infinity 2.0 and 3.0) will spawn as well. Each houses special team-up powers, and must be held for a short period before being activated, giving other players a chance to knock it away. Once the gauge is full, the Disc can be activated, unleashing powerful and often visually stunning effects. The Ant-Man Power Disc causes a giant-sized foot to crash down on the battlefield. The Darkhawk Power Disc shoots some sort of beam no one cares about because Darkhawk.

Check out the training session below to see how it all comes together.

The Battlegrounds playset includes a short but entertaining story mode. Someone’s stealing Vibranium, because the Black Panther figure is coming out, and the player must travel across five different stages before facing a movie-verse appropriate final boss.

Story mode takes around a half hour to complete, with optional challenges expanding solo play time. Each chapter awards experience points, but since characters don’t need to gain experience inBattlegrounds it’s stored in a bank to be applied to any Marvel figure the player owns, to be used to level up abilities in Disney Infinity 3.0 proper.

The real meat of the Battlegrounds set is the four-player versus mode. It’s kind of inspired how the Infinity team put it all together.

Since the physical portal that allows players to activate their figures in-game only has two spots, Battlegrounds uses the figures as one-time unlocks. Place Steve Rogers on the portal once, and he’s available for play in the game mode forever. Folks who don’t have all of the characters can share with their friends to unlock the whole set (or just frantically buy them all).

Even better, there’s a weekly rotation of free trial characters — you don’t need to own Nova to play Nova this week — plus playing the game awards tokens that can be used to select any other locked character from the selection screen. As my children have either misplaced or eaten most of my Marvel Infinitycollection, these features are a lifesaver.

As for the actual battles, they’re crazy fun. Four super-powered friends causing havoc in giant interactive arenas. If you can get three friends together around your television set for this I’d strongly recommend doing so, as you can’t punch AI players in the arm for kicking your butt.

A staggering amount of work went into creating the Marvel Battlegrounds Pack for Disney Infinity 3.0. They built a new combat system, gave every Marvel character in the game new movesets, recorded fresh voice over and built eight exciting fighting stages. All of that for a game within a game.

Earlier this month Disney announced they wouldn’t release a new Disney Infinity game this year, instead focusing on building new experiences within the Disney Infinity 3.0 engine. If Marvel Battlegrounds is any indication, they made the right call.

The Marvel Battlegrounds playset for Disney Infinity 3.0 will be released March 24, alongside new Ant-Man, Black Panther and Vision figures. The $35 set comes with the playset piece and a Steve Roger figure (which incidentally has a different moveset than the previously-released Captain America).

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MARCH 15, 2016 | 10:30AM PT