Mars Needs Moms

This movie is bombing big time. Opening day gross was $1.6 million on a $150 million production budget. There is the March Break to help the movie, but Rango appears to be taking most of its audience. This one may go down in the record books.
 
I wonder what the story is here. I mean the impression I got was that Zemeckis fell in love with what they did with Gollum in Lord of the Rings and wanted to do entire movies of that. And then he made a bunch of flawed awkward looking movies. Says he's making improvements and ways to make the eyes look better . . . and it still looks bad.

Christmas Carol also looked terrible.

Now I'm not saying motion capture is a dead technique because it obviously has proven its value and uses. I love the Appleseed animation and plenty of videogames that have used mo-cap technology. But they just seem to use it to different ends here and achieve faulty results.

Just the movies that Zemeckis has produced all just have this similar off-putting and ugly look. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was supposed to be this revolutionary flick that would produce photo-real humans and a way to replace actors and all that but it was terrible and the characters did not look all that great.
 
Huh, and when walking past the cinema after work today and yesterday, the two screens for it are sold out. Granted, probably because in this community there's a preference for 'respectable family animation' and anything different and edgy, such as Rango, ends up ignored.
 
It opened in 14 international markets (25% of total markets) and grossed $2.1 milion.

Disney reportedly spent $60 million on marketing, in addition to its $150 million production budget. This will go down as one of the largest bombs in the history of animation.
 
Ya know....I gotta say, I don't really recall seeing any commercials for this film before the week it was supposed to come out, so I'm curious of how much Disney backed this project.

In fact....wasn't it reported last year or so that ImageMovers Digital shut down? What's going on with this studio?
 
From what I've read, the studio was supposed to be shut down, but Disney decided to finish up what was already in production at the time of that announcement (this, and Yellow Submarine). Then, it's supposed to shut down for good, after those two movies are finished.

...or, again; so I've read. Things may have changed, but that seems very doubtful now. Mars Needs Moms is bombing so hard, they might decide to just can Yellow Submarine and be done with it.
 
The current Guinness World Record holder for biggest box office bomb in motion picture history, the 1995 Geena Davis pirate movie Cutthroat Island, cost $115 million to make but only made $10 million in theaters.

Mars Needs Moms did worse than that on its opening weekend alone.

Sucks for Disney, but if this means that mo-cap Yellow Submarine remake gets scrapped, then perhaps it's for the best.
 
From what I can tell, Yellow Submarine wasn't far enough along to have been finished by ImageMovers Digital. The original news that ImageMovers Digital was being shuttered by Disney said that Zemeckis and Disney were trying to come to a deal to continue production of Yellow Submarine, suggesting that even if it were finished, it wouldn't be ImageMovers that would be doing it since they had already fired all the people. I think the project is all but sunk now unless Zemeckis can find a studio willing to pick it up. Wouldn't bet the farm on that, but then again I wouldn't have bet the farm that anybody would be willing to give him money to make another mocap CGI movie after the ugly mess that was Beowulf, either.

I don't have any proof, but the lackluster promotion and the release in the January-April timeframe when studios release movies to die makes me think that this is some kind of contractural obligation release, or one where they just spent too much money to just kill it outright.
 
Geez, I knew the movie was going to be suck the moment they put on those awful previews, what was it about anyway? Aliens kidnapping this random mom?:sad:
 
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