No Ice Age for Animation
By
Steven Mallas
April 3, 2006
|
The heat generated by News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) latest CGI offering this past weekend was enough to melt any prehistoric glacier. It also has the media in a frenzy over the hot trend of computer animation.
According to Boxofficemojo.com, Ice Age: The Meltdown took in an estimated $70.5 million (final numbers will be released later). Four years ago, the first Ice Age film grossed approximately $46 million in its initial weekend. It was also released at about this time of year, which makes me wonder what a summer release would do for the franchise -- good things, probably.
The Ice Age sequel had a per-theater average considerably greater than $17,000; the previous entry's average was about $14,000. The movie has been marketed very well and is hitting its intended audience with excellent accuracy. In addition, the sequel opened in more locations than the first one. That indicates a growing franchise in the making, which should make News Corp. shareholders quite happy.
It also makes Disney (NYSE: DIS) shareholders happy, because The Meltdown's intense debut can do nothing but fuel anticipation for the Mouse's next two computerized cartoons -- The Wild and, even more importantly, Pixar's (Nasdaq: PIXR) first release following the Iger-Jobs merger, Cars. Disney's hoping that The Wild can turn into another Chicken Little-like hit. With the DVD of the latter currently clicking with the home-video crowd, that's a distinct possibility.
The $70 million debut of Ice Age: The Meltdown proves that anthropomorphic hijinks generated by sophisticated algorithms are box office gold (and it doesn't hurt to have a good story, either). The Ice Age franchise should survive a lot longer than the woolly mammoth, as should the CGI genre of animation. Sure, many pundits are now predicting that the proliferation of CGI features will dilute the intrinsic novelty of the format, but I think the long-term prognosis is very healthy for the sector. The coffers of the media companies who choose to invest in this arena will benefit as a result, even with the offsetting influence of the inevitable flops.
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