Wow. We didn’t even have a thread for this.
Anyway reviews are coming and it may be another rough box office for Disney in what’s turned out to be a real underperforming string of movies.
But who knows. It’s a kids movie so you can never tell what’s going to hit.
Stars Ariana DeBoise. Directed by Chris Buck (Frozen)
All I can see is Clayface when the goat is talking. Harley Quinn has spoiled me.
Yeah, I saw a review headline like this and thought: uh oh.
Oof.
In this drowsy state of play, Disney’s “Wish” earned a lackluster $8.3 million on Wednesday. The animated film, which tells the origin story of the wishing star that’s featured prominently in other Disney adventures, cost a hefty $200 million to produce. It is projected to earn more than $37 million over the five-day period, a disappointing number given its cost and another sign that the studio is mired in a creative and commercial rut.
Wish wishes it made $37 million. It’s now projected to end the 5-day weekend with $31 million.
Bomb for sure.
Watching the Pitch Meeting for this, I’m shocked how bad the art style looks. They’re obviously trying to mimic a handpainted look (you know you can just handpaint things, Disney?), but instead it looks like someone applied a bad Photoshop filter to the 3D models.
Contrast that to Klaus, which I just watched last night and thought was fantastic:
Oh, yeah, Klaus is great.
Hilariously, they do! Here’s their official reason for not going 2D despite “considering” it:
Wish is not animated in the OG 2D style. Why?
Walt Disney Animation Studios Chief Creative Officer and Wish executive producer/writer Jennifer Lee told IGN in a recent interview that in the early stages of development several years ago, it was seriously discussed.
“We did talk about it in the beginning, in multiple directions,” she said. “It was interesting, because when we first started thinking about it, we were just deciding. It wasn’t like: we can or can’t. It was just deciding, is that what we want to do?”
“What happens in hand-drawn is that you have the incredible hand of the artist, but also limitations in what you could do on screen,” Lee explained. “What happened in CG is you’d have incredible, boundless opportunities, visually, that elevated it — even to the point for some — into realism, which is not what we wanted to do. The more important thing to us was to have a way to find technology that can do everything. Connect to the true vision of the artist, but bring in technology that could finally take away limitations.”
Lee admitted that even after they committed to using computer animation to make Wish, they did consider using traditional animation to bring the character Star to life. Ultimately, she said 2D had too many limitations in terms of camera movements and characterization.
I watched the Pitch Meeting video too, since I figured I won’t be watching this movie any time soon so I didn’t care about spoilers for once. I must say, this just sounds like such a terrible premise.
I finally watched this. It’s not good. I guess it would’ve been fine if it was a direct-to-video movie from the early aughts or something. The songs are blah. The characters are ill-defined. The story is a muddled mess. The art style wasn’t my cup of tea, but I’m sure someone thought it was good looking. The only character I really liked was the queen, but the movie just glosses over her conflicted love for a king who obviously must’ve been showing signs of instability for years.
My wife immediately put on Encanto because she “wanted a good movie to hum along with” and it’s wild how much better it is compared to Wish. Just the initial intro song scenes from both movies are worlds apart in quality. Encanto’s “Family Madrigal” is catchy, dynamic, and effortlessly tells the audience what’s up while punctuating the music with bits of humor and even pathos as we learn about Mirabel’s insecurity. Meanwhile, Wish’s “Welcome to Rosas” is a limp nothing of a song that tells you the same stuff the opening narration said. Yuck.