As Disney’s Big Hero 6 finishes its theatrical run on the heels of its China premiere last week, the big story now is that the animated film firmly takes its place among the biggest Disney animated films of all time. After it’s international run, Big Hero 6 is currently running at $604.8M ($221.3M domestic/$383.5M international) with a few weeks left to run in China. That places it just ahead of Tangled to bring it to third place behind the juggernaut of Frozen and the timeless The Lion King.
Director Kevin Smith started a bit of a wildfire last night when his new horror movie, Red State, was set to be auctioned off at the Sundance Film Festival.
Instead of auctioning off the rights to the room full of buyers, Smith declared that he would be buying his own movie for $20, and self-distributing the movie himself. The decision and the way it played out was not looked upon with happy faces according to multiple reports, who say Smith wasted their time and made a mockery of what they do for a living.
Whether that’s the case or not, the reasoning behind Smith’s decision seems to be more of a statement. Instead of his movie — which went through many difficulties in getting made and looked like it might never even happen for a long while — being acquired by a studio and said studio spending millions on marketing it, Smith wanted to prove that he could do things his way without all the outlandish costs and still find success.
To compensate for the lack of studio backing and marketing expenses, Smith has unveiled a movie tour — a tour for his fans to show off Red State before it’s officially released on October 19, 2011.
You can read Kevin Smith’s “The Red Statement” and find out where this tour will travel by heading over to the other side now.
We live in a time where piracy of movies, music, and various other forms of entertainment is oft-occurring problem. But how much does it really affect the success of those it victimizes?
It’s been officially declared that Avatar, director James Cameron‘s epic movie about humans trying to extract valuable elements from an alien planet inhabited a species known as the Na’vi, is the most pirated movie of 2010. The movie has been downloaded an astonishing 16,580,000 times…on BitTorrent alone. The previous record for downloads was 2009’s Star Trek at 10.9 million, if that tells you anything.
What might be even more shocking about this number is the lack of impact it seemed to have on the movie’s box office run. With an estimated budget of around $300 million, it was feared — though it sounds silly now — that the movie might be destined to flop, but it wasn’t long before Avatar was shattering records. Domestically, the movie brought in $760,507,625 (destroying Cameron’s other seemingly untouchable Titanic, which long sat at over $600 million), while overseas box office delivered $2,019,044,242, putting it very close to hitting $3 billion worldwide.
This news is so very incomprehensible, you might just find yourself staring at the numbers for an hour or two before snapping out a shock-induced coma.
It’s no secret that Avatar was the biggest movie that this or any other world has ever seen (maybe…I hear Omicron Persei 8 is remaking Bikini Party Summer). With a budget somewhere in the $250 million to $300 million budget, the risk was unheard of and failure would have been of cataclysmic proportions. But we should all know by now that James Cameron knows best, and he’s about to have a very good day because of it.
Remember when it was outrageous to go to a movie theater because a $7-$10 admission ticket paired with an $8 tub of popcorn and a $6 soda for just one person was breaking banks nation wide? You haven’t seen anything yet.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that multiple movie theaters in New York City — where prices have consistently remained highest — is charging a nice round $20 fee to see Shrek Forever After in their 3D IMAX theaters. That’s right — if you plan on taking your family of four out for a night to see the kids’ beloved Shrek, Donkey, Fiona, and Puss in Boots, it will easily run you more than $100 if you add a snack or liquid refreshment.
If this catches on, it could mean that theaters everywhere could be charging as much as it costs us to BUY & OWN the movie on Blu-ray or DVD just to see the flick one time, one sunny afternoon.
Students of the Unusual™ comic cover used with permission of 3BoysProductions
The Mercuri Bros.™ comic cover used with permission of Prodigal Son Press