Disney’s 10 biggest animated flops
After a dismal opening weekend, Strange World may soon join Disney's least-wanted list
Film Features Robert Louis Stevenson
All images © Walt Disney Studios Graphic: The A.V. Club
Before Strange World premiered over Thanksgiving weekend, we wondered whether Disney could attract audiences to an animated film that wasn’t a musical or a sequel. Now we know the answer—a resounding nope. Despite generally positive reviews, the film’s generic marketing campaign didn’t give Disney fans a compelling reason to see it in theaters and it fizzled at the box office (to be fair, none of the weekend’s new releases had stellar openings). The film earned just $18.6 million domestically and $27.8 million worldwide. Compare that to an estimated budget of $120 million and Disney is looking at a lot of red in its ledger. Even if the film somehow manages to overcome the initial disappointment and build on its numbers in the coming weeks, that’s a lot of ground to make up.
We won’t know the final take until it finishes its theatrical run, but the news already has us contemplating whether Strange World will eventually rank among Disney’s biggest animated bombs. In case you’re also curious, here’s a list of films that were considered flops due to underperformance at the box office in their initial theatrical runs. You may be surprised to find some beloved classics on this list; they may be considered successful now, but at the time they came out they were financial disasters. Keep in mind that these totals are based on worldwide theatrical box office and don’t include subsequent re-releases, streaming, or home video, all of which have boosted their overall take through the years. Perhaps there will come a day, maybe in the distant future, when Strange World will get its due as well.
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we wondered whether Disney could attract audiences to an animated film that wasn’t a musical or a sequel. Now we know the answer—a resounding nope.Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia all say the answer is yes. Strange World seems to be more of an outlier.
Between this and mistaking Strange World for a Pixar release in another article, I’m just convinced AV Club writers see “CGI, no princess” and assume “Pixar film.”
Pretty sure Ethan ticked of all the princess boxes…….
Strange World got NO marketing that I saw.It also didn’t really strike me as a Disney-like film, at least until the very last trailer. It gave me very strong “Fox Animation” vibes, which is not a good thing.
I was entirely unaware of Strange World until I saw the articles about what a flop it was.
The fact that the characters are ugly and the environments are eye watering probably didn’t help.
Doesnt Disney basically own Fox Animation and it’s catalog now? Maybe a lot of their animators are working for Disney Animation Studios now.
The difference between the winners and the loser is that Disney could distill Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia into short soundbites to hook kids into wanting to watch them and parents to drag their kids to the theaters. Wreck-It Ralph was ‘80s nostalgia and classic video games. Big Hero 6 was superheroes, Marvel comics and everyone loved Baymax.Zootopia was cute, fluffy animals are running a city like people and everyone loved the sloths run the DMV joke. Having watched an occasional trailer for Strange World, I can’t tell you what the hook for the audience is aside from cosmic space and world exploration and an emphasis on space farming from not-cute and not-memorable characters.I’ve heard from first-hand reviews that the movie is pretty awesome. I plan on seeing it in theaters (just not right now), but Disney really dropped the ball in marketing a good movie if it holds up.
It was really good. I saw it opening day and there was like 6 other people in the theater. The marketing did this no favors.
My wife and I are Disney+ subscribers, went to Disneyland a couple months ago, and consider ourselves fairly big Disney fans.I don’t think I’ve seen a single ad for it, I have no idea what it’s about, and I didn’t realize it was already in theaters.
What marketing?
But half the “selling points” you listed are things you only know once you’ve seen the movie.
“I plan on seeing it in theaters (just not right now)“ you’re gonna miss your opportunity
Zootopia was cute, fluffy animals are running a city like people and everyone loved the sloths run the DMV joke.This is a top tier joke and honestly, one of the best jokes I’ve seen in a Disney movie lol.
From the comments & articles I’ve seen online, the only thing I know about Strange world is Gays in Space. That’s it. Takes place in space, and a character (or more?) is gay. Literally no other info.
Sounds like you better hurry if you want to catch it in theaters.
I should note that Alice In Wonderland and Sleeping Beauty have since become successful as theatrical rereleases. Alice was pretty big in the 60s because of its drug like imagery and Sleeping Beauty is now the second highest grossing film of 1959 behind just Ben Hur. Maybe worth noting. Treasure Planet however will always be a net negative.
I blame the protagonist’s stupid haircut.
Also, now that Disney owns the Muppets there are at least three Disney movies based on Treasure Island. The classic 1950 version with Robert Newton (who is believed to have invented the “Pirate accent” as we know it today by basically exaggerating a Bristol accent) as Long John Silver , Muppet Treasure Island (1996) with Tim Curry doing an admirable, if not classic, Silver, and finally Treasure Planet (2002) with Brian Murray doing a rather bland Silver. Yes, it is cute how they made it SF, but that gimmick doesn’t stop the film from being the weakest of the three.
As the pirate expert, we don’t need to even say believed. He totally pioneered the “pirate accent” with his absurd West Country Bristol accent. The two guys who created International Talk Like a Pirate Day openly said Newton is a patron saint. Hell he came back for a Treasure Island sequel and a Blackbeard film just because people liked that accent.
Wasn’t Cornwall famous for piracy – well, at least, smuggling?Hence the very model of the model major-general and all that?For those wonderin’ what a Cornish accent sounds like.Also, I’ve been watching Rick Stein’s Cornwall and it’s the first show I’ve come across that made Blighty seem exotic.
Cornwall is near Bristol (it’s the peninsula just south of it), so it makes sense that the accent would be similar. Yes, Cornwall was known for piracy, and also (like Bristol) known for generating a lot of the sailors for the Royal Navy. Many pirates were former Navy who realized they could make much more money going out on their own.
Was a lot of shipping and indeed smuggling. Probably with pirates although the catch is that we rarely know where most pirates came from due to poor documentation.
Cornwall is indeed known for piracy and smuggling, though tales of wreckers (criminals who used fake lighthouse signals to lure ships to the rocks and then plundered the wrecks) are apparently apocryphal. I think it probably has to do with the rocky Cornish coastline – plenty of small, hard to navigate little coves that are perfect for hiding nefarious sea-business.
Funny the legend of Wreckers like that are common in the Carolinas and Florida and are equally unlikely to be true.
My kids watched Treasure Planet once some years ago. They never asked to watch it again. This says a lot, because they liked watching the same thing OVER and OVER and OVER again.
My cousin’s daughters did the same with Frozen. Let it go? Oh, they let it go – right in the shredder.
Muppets for the win!
“Cabin Fever, Yeah-h-h.”
Tim Curry’s Silver does have the distinction of being the only iteration to have fucked Miss Piggy.
Only because she hadn’t been created when the ’72 Orson Welles version came out.
It is a pretty awful haircut, can’t defend it.
and the Creed songs
If I was gonna blame anything besides bad marketing, it’d be Martin Short’s yelly, stupid, harbinger of Jar Jar performance.
I think its interesting how many “classics” were actually flops (based on the criteria used here). There’s the two you mentioned, but also Bambi, Pinocchio, and The Sword In The Stone. Fantasia to a degree as well though I think most people know it because of a few famous clips than actually watching the entire movie. I guess repeated showings after their debuts just got them into the collective consciousness and turned themselves into classics and more financial success with re-releases
I believe Pinocchio was well received at the time. WWII just prevented the film from being seen in wider release.
Yep. Same thing with original Fantasia. Not having access to Europe hurt it quite a bit. Both of course made the money back over the years. Fantasia, much like Alice, did well in the 1960s releases because of the creative imagery that went well with shall we say, certain substances.
Very happy to hear that Alice turned a profit, as its easily their best animated film.I damn near had an existential crisis at 5 years old upon seeing it for the first time. When she’s lost in the woods, and that cute little terrier with a broom for a face erased her path to the past, and then the one to the future, leaving her with nowhere to go…
I find it bizarre that critics didn’t like it because there wasn’t a character arc or a plot structure. I’d call that a plus for an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, although its really a weird mix of both Alice books. Kathryn Beaumont is always my go to Alice far as any adaptation goes.
The Rescuers was super dark too. Child abduction. Swamp hideout on a dilapidated boat. I mean holy crap.
Man I loved that movie as a kid, one of my top Disneys for sure since I wasn’t into princess stuff.
Treasure Planet isn’t even that bad. There are some shots in that film that are just amazing and huge technology advances for animation. It’s also a fairly faithful adaption of Treasure Island, including keeping Long John Silver a complicated character and not just making him the “bad guy”
Its not my favorite Disney animated film but its quite watchable and fun. I’d certainly take it over Brother Bear and Home on the Range far as early 2000s Disney goes.
I watched it a little while ago and had a decent enough time with it. I feel like one more pass on the script could have really delivered something.
They could have easily made a straight-forward adaptation of Treasure Island, but no, they had to set in space and give the protagonist that stupid-fucking-arse haircut.
It sucks that Treasure Planet bombed. That was the last big name movie using that particular type of CGI/animation that I can recall. I personally like it, having watched it again somewhat recently.
Lol watching the new scooby doo movie, it was obvious they lifted one character directly out of atlantis and just reskinned her model
Lol really? Which character?
Oh, the mechanic
Gay don’t pay.
It pains me to see Treasure Planet on this list. Still one of my all-time favourite Disney movies.And Strange World has had abysmal marketing, an unusually bad Thanksgiving, and isn’t even the only Disney movie in theaters right now. The movie itself seems fine; I think anything else releasing in these circumstances would struggle too.
My son (now 22) was at just the right age to watch this on DVD and along with Atlantis, he (meaning we) watched it over and over and over again. Treasure Planet grows on you. Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, idk, but the Silver cyber/minotaur design and vocal performance is pretty good. I liked how he pronounced “Morph” as “Marf.”“What is that thing?”“Woi itsa marf. Get out here Marf and say hello.”
Treasure planet and Atlantis are in my top 5 disney movies of all time
I’ve seen almost no marketing except for the occasional billboard which literally just has the movie title and nothing else in it whatsoever. Like, I’m supposed to be sold on two words?
Fox’s Titan AE (2000) along with Disney’s Atlantis (2001) and Treasure Planet (2002) have all been kinda forgotten by the mainstream. Which is sad, because it was a period when the studios were actually trying to push more mature sci-fi stories using then-cutting edge animation.
Titan AE was and still is one of my favorite movies ever. Its why every time someone asks what a thing should be named, I suggest “Bob.”
Never got around to Treasure Planet but I absolutely love both Titan AE and Atlantis. It’s a shame they’re not more popular.
Yep. Instesd, those three movies signaled the death of traditional 2D Theatrical animation.
Disney is competing with themselves. They’ve saturated the market with a shotgun approach.
I was shocked not to see Home on the Range on this list, so I looked it up. Wikipedia reported that the movie was surprisingly profitable ($145m on a $110m budget).That sounded…suspicious so I dug into the boxofficemojo page that everyone cites as their source. I’m pretty sure that there’s a miscalcuation on France’s earnings reporting ~10x more than there should be ($53m, not $5.3m). Update this and the film is now a deep loss (Disney officially wrote it down as a $70m loss, according to that wiki article).Who wants to check my work?
I had to do some homework a month ago on some sketchy Boxoffice Mojo numbers. So many problems of today’s Internet can be explained by everybody citing that bullshit site
Thanks, this seems like another case of many respectable sites all reporting the same non-respectable data in an echo chamber to make it legitimate (like the street sharks thing).Do you happen to come across a way to report inaccuracies? In this case, it’s a straight-up typo of an extra digit in an obscure number that then propagated. I didn’t seen an obvious button anywhere on box office mojo.
Street Sharks thing?
https://medium.com/pcmag-access/how-i-used-lies-about-a-cartoon-to-prove-history-is-meaningless-on-the-internet-6c88bcbc62d7Bad info posted to a fan site propagated to legitimate sites for years.
Im incline to agree, that movie got savaged by critics and I believe the book Disney War said it was a bad enough flop that Eisner killed the hand drawn wing of Disney for it. Brother Bear I think also didn’t do well either.
Thanks, I had forgotten about Brother Bear, myself. It looks like reception tepid but still made money.I understand the decision to squash hand-drawn animation when crap like “Shark Tale” were more than tripling the hand-drawn earnings.
God that’s depressingly true. Shark Tale made more money then any hand drawn film at the time for DreamWorks, which included flops like Sinbad and Road to El Dorado.
I remember hearing that it was to be the last hand drawn film from Disney before it came out, not after.
To be fair though most studios will use financial shenanigans to report a loss, even for movies that make some money.
On the plus side, Treasure Planet Cereal was the shit.
Since Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain are some of my favorite (and imo best) YA fantasy novels out there, and clearly inspired much of Star Wars amongst others — I hated that The Black Cauldron flopped, but also that they did a piss-poor adaptation of it…
Yeah, I loved the Chronicles of Prydain, it primed me to read Lord of the Rings and turn into the Sci Fi/Fantasy lover I am today, and I remember even as a kid being disappointed that they adapted the second book and thinking that was a bad sign. I guess it’s got more visually arresting scenes to animate than The Book of Three, but I wanted to see the whole series! And I still blame it for robbing us of ever seeing (as of yet, fingers crossed) a good visual adaptation of those books. That being said, I liked it when I saw it. I enjoyed it more than Great Mouse Detective.
I’m curious as to how successful the latest incarnation of Pinocchio was for Disney. The one that is streaming on Disney+, with Tom Hanks. We saw that and it was really a bizarre movie, with WTF moments and parts that didn’t make sense and had my son going “How did they…?” Granted, I hadn’t seen the original animated one in decades, but still… weird version.
It’s just a weird story. The source material is weird, the original Disney version is super weird. Every other variation is weird. It’s just weird. It’s a weird and off putting story from a time period when childhood was thought about and treated very differently than it is now.
With me it was “let’s watch this” I said to my 14-yr old son, who hasn’t seen the original, but has seen several Tom Hanks movies. Afterwards, we’re both “What did we just watch?” It’s hard to recommend…
I think the fact Pinocchio was originally a weekly serialized story has a lot to do with with it odd structure and off-putting story. To state the obvious, writing a weekly serial is different than writing a novel. With the former, a writer’s focus is on completing one episode at a time rather than a whole book. Story lines are developed on the fly and can be abruptly changed or dropped altogether if the writer finds he’s written himself into a corner or is getting negative feedback from the editor or readers.
Facts. I haven’t seen Del Toro’s yet, but it will probably be weird too. I’ve seen the Jonathan Taylor Thomas one, and the Roberto Beningni one, and the Italian one from a couple years ago, and now the live-action Disney remake. I keep watching these, not sure what to make of any of them.
Treasure Planet was an underrated gem. Disney didn’t want it to succeed. It was a passion project for two creators under them who brought them hit after hit after hit. They gave in to let them FINALLY make the movie they wanted to make when they first started working for Disney. It used expensive animation technology Disney did *not* want to continue doing in the future. They had an absolutely sub-par advertising plan. The trailers were completely off-match for the tone of the movie, and they overhyped a barely-there comic relief character while spoiling the twist in the movie.Still not convinced? When Lilo and Stitch was coming out – they had a great campaign blending stitch into classic Disney movies. They had Toy Deals with Disney. They slated it to go up at the beginning of the summer in a week where their biggest competition was Scooby Doo live action movie.Treasure Planet? It was a summer movie, released in the winter. It ran up against not only the first Harry Potter movie, but Disney’s own Santa Clause 2. Both had been expected to do big numbers and did so. If Disney wanted this movie to succeed, it would have. They had that advertising power and ability back then. Say it’s a flop, because by definition it was. It did not make back more than it cost to make. But let’s not pretend it failed on it’s own merits. Disney obviously had no interest in this movie succeeding, seeing as how it was a fulfillment of an obligation to two creators that had made them so much money, and developed with an animation style they definitely did not want to continue shelling out for in future films. Frankly the hit they took on Treasure Planet I’m sure to them saved them as much if not more down the road by letting them bury this creation long before it was born.
Forgot to mention – they had the marketing surveys from customers and another large part of why Treasure Planet’s numbers were low is that people knew they didn’t have to rush to theaters – it’d be out by spring on DVD. Again, not Treasure Planet’s fault – literally a victim of changing media.
And now they announce it will be on streaming in four weeks. Lesson decidedly NOT learned.
Right? Movies aren’t even in theaters long enough for word of mouth from opening weekend to get someone in the next weekend. Makes you wonder why they even bother anymore…
Lilo & Stitch’s ad campaign was AMAZING! And that was another sci-fi movie that wasn’t a sequel or a musical.
Sorry but publicly held corporations don’t try to lose money and tank their stock price. It wasn’t intentional. Feeling that the princess market was all tapped out and seeing the rise in interest in Anime, Disney made an expensive push to try to cater to an untapped boy market. After a disappointing result for Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the studio-killing flop of Fox’s similar Titan A.E., Disney realized that it wasn’t going to work and obviously freaked out (as reflected in frenzied flop sweat of schizophrenic marketing)Treasure Planet is an underrated gem (probably the most underrated Disney traditionally animated movie) but there is no conspiracy needed to explain why it failed.
You would be surprised what you can write off as a business expense on your federal taxes as a corporation.While Treasure Planet wasn’t successful, all of the advertising and the $31M loss on the budget was definitely written off and reduced their tax burden at the end of the year.However, releasing a film on the same weekend as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Die Another Day (Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond film), and Santa Clause 2.
In the age of multiplexes, what movie would you want to spend your Black Friday/Thanksgiving Weekend watching with your family to get into the holiday spirit?
It had a terrible premiere day. Right around Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter if I recall.
I’ve never seen it, but I’m inclined to believe you just based on Musker and Clements’ other work. These guys made Aladdin, Little Mermaid, and Moana, not to mention Princess and the Frog and Hercules. Are they the best Disney filmmakers of modern times?
And The Great Mouse Detective (collaborating with Burny Mattinson and Dave Michener). I think it’s safe to call them the best and/or most successful Disney animated feature directors since Walt was running things, at least.
They did the same thing John Carter, which is still one of my favorite one-off SF action/adventure movies…
I actually saw The Black Cauldron on cinema release, I think it had been a double with Return to Oz.A pretty dark but pretty awesome time at the movies from what I recall!
Did you get to see it in 70mm? It would’ve looked spectacular on that format.
I suspect being that it was regional Australia in the 80s (and Australia as a whole isn’t exactly awash with upscale cinema screens) that I did not.
the black cauldron is part of a very strong fantasy series that i remember loving as a kid, its kind of midway between tolkien and the darkness of moorcock. its a shame that they didnt gauge the market right with black cauldron, im hoping someone does the chronicles of prydain justice at some point.
and the darkness……OF MOORCOCK!
Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain! Such a great YA series – before those were really even a thing. I devoured those books as a kid. The Black Cauldron is actually the second book in the series but they drew the story from the movie from both books 1 and 2. I was actually thinking about giving my daughter the series for Christmas – not sure how well it still holds up.
“Moorcock”!
3/5 of the Prydain books are much closer to the whimsy of The Hobbit (or even Roverandom) than to anything like Moorcock, and even the last two books aren’t exactly darker then Lord of the Rings.
If Disney were going to pump out a “new” IP series similar to Pirates of the Caribbean, this is where they should start.
The books would seem a really good fit for a streaming series. Pretty amazing that with GOT, LotR, Wheel of Time, and The Witcher series all in various stages of production, someone hasn’t snatched up the Prydain books in the fantasy adaptation fury. I wonder if Disney has long term rights but still feels burned by The Black Cauldron?
I think in addition to it being remembered as a major Disney flop, it’s remembered as a massive disappointment of fans of the books (myself included). I keep wondering if someone will take another stab at the series, which IIRC are definitely not children’s books.
Return to Oz is a TRIP.
I saw it in theaters when I was 7 and for years after it was like a fever dream of a movie that no one ever talked about. The 80s were such a weird time where we kids were bombarded with media but as fast as it showed up it disappeared. One of the joys of the early internet for me was finding out about all these old shows and movies I barely remember.
Hard to believe it had that big of a budget. I rewatched ‘The Black Cauldron’ recently and boy, is it a mess. The animation was fine but lacked polish. The pacing and the editing were pretty bad and overall lacked any heart or emotional build-up. As kids, Gurgi’s brush with death I’m sure was tearful but it all happens so fast and then, with the stroke of a wand, undoes all that.
It felt more like a concept for a Disney World ride than a feature length movie.
Just found one of those the other day.Ulysses 31…..Think Odysseus doing the whole of the odyssey in space. The art style start to finish vintage 1980’s Cybertron.
I agree with your line of …’as fast as the movies showed up, they were gone’. Many good movies are released, but I’m guessing to be put onto streaming services, are gone before I realize they were released.
That is an amazing not child friendly nightmare inducing combo.
There were a lot of animated films like that at the time.
I’m from regional Australia and from back in the day when Predator and Aliens were just rated M (advised for mature audiences but no actual age restriction).Of course pre-teen me when and saw them both and it was awesome.I *might* have had to spend at least one day sleeping in my parents room after Aliens which of course adds to the awesome points!
Australia in the 80’s?+1 Razorback, mate!
You might encounter this taking out the trash, but had to sleep under a bed after Alien?
Aw, isn’t he a cutie!
I read several of the original Baum Oz books so I was actually stoked to see Return to Oz doing them justice, even as an 8 year old. Also fantastic casting.
I remember seeing it vividly, because it was the only movie I ever saw at a drive-in as a child. The rotoscoped skeleton sequences were super cool. The Prydain chronicles are also absolutely worth reading.
Same. It remains one of my little brother’s favorites!!
I had the computer game made by Sierra OnLine. It was kind of a simplified version of King’s Quest, but that game, along with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text game (which I have NEVER finished, but I did solve the Babel Fish puzzle) got me into PC gaming.
There’s a game I haven’t thought about in a long time. I remember playing when it was first released. Good times.
This – one of my earliest movie theatre memories was seeing Black Cauldron. I remember really enjoying it and eventually getting into the Lloyd Alexander novels they based the movie on. Disney buried it DEEP in the vault for years – I don’t think you could even rent it. I remember everytime we went to a disney store trying to find the VHS. On my family’s one trip to Disney World I was convinced that I would be able to buy a copy there but I don’t think it ever became available until I was in my 20’s.
They should have never race-swapped the cauldron. Go woke go broke!
The Black Cauldron was produced during that period where Disney’s son-in-law Ron Miller, who was running the company at that point, knew Disney had to start offering more mature content, but how to do that without alienating the kiddie-movie core audience eluded him. I suspect it didn’t help that a lot of the creative staff at Disney, and many on the Board of Directors, were still asking “What Would Walt Do?”—and kept coming up with the wrong answer.
The result was an uncomfortable mix of adult themes with the same kind of stuff Disney was doing when Kurt Russell was under contract to them! By 1979 even Russell was getting away from being a “Disney Kid”—he’d just worked with John Carpenter on the TV-Movie Elvis, and Used Cars, Escape from New York and The Thing were in his future. By trying to please everybody with movies like this one, The Black Hole and Condorman, Disney ended up pleasing nobody.
It’s not one of Disney’s best films by any means, but the original, uncut version of “The Black Cauldron” is one of my most wanted unseen films.
I’d also love to be in the alternate world where the studio didn’t start purging great artists while making it. I’d love to see Burtons monster designs that they deemed to scary
The was a Rolling Stone article about Burton, early in his career, that had some amusing stories about his time in Disney (and working on Black Cauldron in particular) which showed one of his designs. It was a skeletal vulture with claws coming out its eye sockets. It was pretty creepy and cool and I think about it whenever I consider how bland Burton’s stuff has become.
Yeah they really missed out on some great talent in those days. Say what you will about Walt Disney, but he had an incredible eye for talent, and many of the animators he recruited, who came to define the studio’s Golden Age, would’ve been dismissed by the 80s Disney bigwigs so fast, because they were all eccentrics and political radicals who could easily have become surrealists or abstract painters, but all were damned incredible animators.
wait there’s an “uncut Black Cauldron”?
Indeed! It’s one of the more sought after “lost” films in recent memory. Reports vary, but the general consensus is that around ten minutes was cut, both for time, and content, which was deemed too graphic in nature. Reportedly, then Disney Chairperson Jeffrey Katzenberg even went so far as to enter the editing room and make cuts himself, resulting in a final film that has pretty noticeable jump cuts because the soundtrack was never remixed to cover the cuts. The original, uncut negative reportedly is still in the vaults (Disney, it must be said, it one of the most diligent studios when it comes to saving and preserving its films), but any kind of restoration is hampered by the cost involved, on a film that is definitely on the lower tier of their animated films, and mainly is a source of interested to the more dedicated minority of Disney fans and fans of animation.
huh that’s really cool. Release the Berman Cut!
There is one of the unedited scenes out there floating around for a Disney special showing the horned king being especially extra… from the early 90’sEisner was doing a tv special about the rerelease and was like see this kids it was too scary so we cut that garbage
I understand this is a fluff piece, but since the point is profitability, you gotta clarify that production cost is just that, the money it takes to produce the movie. The marketing and distribution cost, as a rule of thumb, usually double that, since they spend more on marketing to try and recoup large production budgets. On top of that, the revenue is split in complicated ways with viewing venues, so they don’t get back anywhere near 100% of what they gross. All to say, with Disney or any other movie, if you see it nearly turning a profit in production cost versus revenue, that means it actually lost money. And the bigger the production budget, the likelihood increases of the loss being enormous.
Maybe part of the problem is that I hadn’t seen a trailer for Strange World until this very minute and was only aware it existed because of an article like this—and I watch a lot of TV.
Hopefully Strange World will pick up some viewers in the coming weeks. It’s a fun movie. My biggest issue was that I thought it was another Disney+ drop, and only realized later that we had to go see it in the theater.
If this list proved anything, a Disney movie flopping at release doesn’t doom it to obscurity. Of the list above I’d only say Fantasia 2000 is the only one that the mouse has super buried. Even Black Cauldron gets some love now and then in the last few decades. Some of the rest of beloved classics like Sleeping Beauty and Sword and the Stone
It’s a shame about Fantasia 2000, because while half the movie is just passable, the other half is actually really good. There’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, of course, but I love both of Goldberg’s segments (“Rhapsody in Blue” and “Carnival of the Animals: Finale”) as well as the concluding “Firebird Suite” segment. Plus it killed off any hopes of further continuations of the concept; I would love to see what Andreas Deja or Shawn Keller could have brought to the table as a director in a later iteration.
I saw it and I went in wanting to like it but, boy, I thought it was a stinker. The story was generic, the characters were bland, it wasn’t funny, it wasn’t particularly emotional, the strange world was so strange that any problems that arose or solutions they found just seemed like they were pulled out of the writer’s butt so there was no real tension… and there wasn’t even any music to enjoy! I felt absolutely no connection to any facet of this movie. Now, I went alone and I don’t have kids, so maybe I’m just missing the point, but this movie left me absolutely cold. The only positive points I can think of are that, first, it was an original idea and not a sequel or remake, and second, they had a main character that was gay and it was no big deal to anybody at all. So I’ve been a little surprised to see people say they enjoyed it… I’m genuinely curious what you liked about it?
Ive seen literally no marketing for this movie and just a few pics from it now that is being reviewed. But that’s enough to make me notice how the character designs are so aggressively ugly. I’m ready for the oversized rubber head style to die anyway, but why do they all have dead black button eyes? It’s so creepy.
Fantasia 2000 has an awesome segment starring Donald and Daisy Duck, set to “Pomp and Circumstance,” and riffing on Noah’s ark.
I liked Rhapsody in Blue and the one with the whales
I weirdly liked The Rescuers Down Under as a child, even though I knew nothing of The Rescuers. Those mice had a nice rapport. And the giant bird was cool.
Yeah, I still have a soft spot for it because I loved it so much as a kid.
I loved Down Under and was well into adulthood before I learned that it was a sequel. I watched the original once with my kid and neither of us found it nearly as much fun. George C. Scott is clearly having the time of his life voicing the poacher.
My mom took me to see the 1989 re-release of The Rescuers. Then I saw Down Under sequel….ugh. The original was so cool and creepy, the sequel was garbage.
I still haven’t seen The Black Cauldron. I hear it’s just so bad.
It’s bad, but an interesting kind of bad.
It’s a hot mess of conflicting animation styles – sometimes in the same scene! – and characters who are animated from very old reference footage. If you gave Taran a hat and a slightly different outfit, you couldn’t tell his animation from Peter Pan. The Assistant Pigkeeper and the Princess both have equally posh quasi-British accents.Also Disney management “felt that the animators were spoiled brats and commanded them to follow orders and do as they were told.” Been there, done that; it never ends well.
The actress who plays the princess was also Princess Sylvia in an BBC cartoon called Muzzy, which was a language educational tool about an alien yeti who eats clocks. Yes, really.
It’s on D+ if you use that platform.
Watched it about a year ago and its biggest fault is that they didn’t know how to end the movie. The characters are fun and it’s an absolutely beautiful movie. Definitely worth a watch.
I absolutely adored Rescuers when I was a kid, still do to this day, it and Wall E are perfection. Alice and Pinocchio are certainly Disney’s darkest animated films from their era, not particularly surprising to see they didn’t do well in theaters. However, they are both easily 2 of the better Disney films ever produced, and both are FANTASTIC to watch on mescalin.
As a child I found the Rescuers to be horrifying in a Mystic River kind of way.
How did Raya and the Last Dragon do?
Was Bambi actually a flop or was it just that they wanted to make this a top 10 list and needed a another movie to get there. Because it made over three times it’s budget. Today any movie that does that would be considered a success. I would be surprised if things were that different in 1942.
The Rescuers Down Under, a “tepid sequel”? Them’s fightin’ words.
it’s obviously bullshit from someone that hasn’t watched the movie and just wants engagement
My son LOVED Rescuers Down Under. He (we) watched it over and over again. As an adult, he sailed across the Pacific and settled in…Australia. I prefer the original Rescuers. We call all dragonflies “Evinrude.”
Long “E” or short “E”?
It’s definitely a weird movie. It brings in a magical kid who can talk to animals with no real explanation. It has some pretty serious Don Bluth feel to it, where world-building is fuzzy and fantastical elements are shoe-horned in.
I won’t deny it’s odd and uneven in spots, though I will mention that Penny was able to talk with animals in the original film too. Overall I’d still say it’s a fine kid-friendly adventure, with George C. Scott turning in a solid, if not flamboyant, performance as the villain.
I am surprised the first thing you think of the movie is “weird” and not the quality of the animation, or just having the best pieces of it of the last, four decades? The flight at the beginning is a masterpiece that has not been improved by any other movie in any other country.
I mean,
You can’t really trust the AV Club anymore on pop culture/media pre-1990 or so. That was solidified by the “Best Thanksgiving TV Episodes” article last week that had a non-Thanksgiving Office episode, yet didn’t include WKRP, Cheers, or Bob Newhart.
They also have to bring in a ringer like Erlewine for any music recorded before 2005.
Gen x is the most despised of all generations for a damn good reason
Home, home on the rangeWhere the critters are tied up in chainsIt was one of my favorites growing up. I watched that VHS tape a million times. The animation still holds up, by the way
I like the Rescuers, but Down Under is indeed better. I mean George C Scott as a psychopathic poacher that really seems to enjoy messing with a kid? Yes!
George C. Scott scared the fuck out of me and I saw it when I took my little sister. I was 18.
Yeah, Scott wasn’t flamboyant, but he was suitably menacing.
I’m 30 and have never even heard of it lol
Yeah, flat out it’s better than the original
Love Treasure Planet, it’s awesome.And Black Cauldron is good as well, saw it again a few months ago. Yes it’s dated with some dialogue/views but still watchable.
This is the type of movie they should remake and do better. Instead of just converting their good ones to bad live action movies…
It seems like Strange World will fall into pretty much the same niche as Meet the Robinsons where the film is well-liked by people who have seen it; it is just hard to get people to actually see it. The marketing for this one too has been very low key. I have seen just a couple ads for it, and I regularly view nerdy movie content, so my algorithm should be chock full of ads. The only time I am seeing a significant amount of coverage are articles talking about how poorly the film is doing financially (including this one). I wonder if after the disappointing returns on the Buzz Lightyear movie, someone at Disney realized the pattern (straight-up animated scifi movies just don’t appeal to our audience) and cut the advertising budget for Strange World, figuring doing so would mitigate some of the overall losses? But I guess this becomes a chicken and egg thing. Was the film’s disappointing return due to the lack of marketing, or was the film already judged to most likely be a failure regardless of marketing? Who can say?
Surprised not to see Atlantis on this list!
Clearly the problem was that Fantasia 2000 was released in 1999.Either it was too ahead of its time or people thought they had to wait another year to see it.
Maybe they were worried about the Y2K apocalypse. Fortunately, crisis averted.
Good point. We hardly talk about Y2k’s unseen victims. I’m sure we can lump Blues Brothers 2000 in that same unfortunate group.
GodDAMN I love Fantasia 2000.That’s it. That’s the comment.
I’ve never heard of Strange Worlds or that it was made by Disney, so there’s a problem right there.
Thank You. https://www.godrejsparkretreat.in/
This story fundamentally misunderstands how Box Office numbers work. Studios don’t get all that money. A film that cost $100m and earns $100m back at the BO, has lost at least $50m. NOT broken even as stated here over and over again.
This whole article is in defense of Strange World failing (for various reasons, lets not be simplistic and only blame political agendas).
It simply didn’t look good or original in the very minimal marketing I saw for it. At this point the anti-gay people all already hate Disney. Also, I was deeply disappointed at how meh Lightyear was. I think the idea of using essentially the same stories and just changing the gender or race or orientation of a few characters a losing model for reasons that have nothing to do with gender or race or orientation. It’s just lazy storytelling.
It’s fucked up logic to say that women, or lgbtqia folks, or poc have to exist in a story for a reason related to their gender/orientation/race. These groups just exist in real life. Me being a woman isn’t the overarching narrative of my life, dude. How is a story full of white men fighting space wizards or whatever any less arbitrary than a story full of black women doing the same thing? That’s stupid. And as for telling familiar stories from new and different perspectives, it’s just. I don’t know. It’s like you just ate a cake while the person next to you had nothing to eat. So then they say, “I’d like a cake now too, I’m hungry.” And you respond with, “Ugh! Cake? Again? But I just had a whole cake, I’m so sick of cake.” What does it take from you to acknowledge other people want to have the same familiar cake you’ve enjoyed this whole time?
“telling familiar stories from new and different perspectives” I think you misunderstood my intent or I didn’t make it clear. Telling familiar stories from new and different perspectives is great. I am all for that. Telling EXACTLY the same story but adding in one gay person or POC seems reductive. I would like to see stories from THEIR perspectives, not the same story with them in the starring role. Encanto is a good example of doing it right. Ghostbusters (2016) is a good example of doing it wrong. But an all female Ghostbusters would be great IMO if it focused more on the issues women have being taken seriously in STEM fields and less on being a silly comedy.
I think it might be a bit more complicated for older movies. I mean what was the marketing budget for something like Black Cauldron? Probably some newspaper ads, some posters and a trailer. It’s not like there would be a huge multi-media push with a huge press junket and comic-con appearances. For movies pre-1948 it gets even more complicated since movie studios could own their own theatres. I am not sure if Disney owned theatres, but Bambi and Fantasia were released by RKO which did.
Weird, I never realized that The Black Cauldron was a Disney movie. I always assumed it was one of the many Don Bluth flops of the late 80s and early 90s.
I think the massive layoffs after Sleeping Beauty were also due to Walt being VERY anti-union and he had a very dictatorial way of running his artists. The whole Disney being anti-Semitic was made up by the unions when he tried to stop his employees from organizing.
What? That’s super revisionist history, there’s tons of evidence of his Nazi sympathies
Anyone who thinks Walt Disney was a Nazi sympathizer is a moron. As for him being an anti-Semite, “The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney” by Michael Barrier is the best biography ever done on the man and it concludes that Walt was not in any way or form an anti-Semite.
Remember when 1 month after Kristallnacht in 1938 Walt invited a Nazi director to the studio, one of the only studio owners to do so? Or his work with (and founding of) the anti-semitic Motion Picture Alliance? A bunch of people who work for Disney and his family aren’t exactly trustworthy. The wolf in Three Little Pigs? Wernher Braun in “Wonderful World of Disney.” Obviously all perfectly normal behavior.
Hmmm, I wonder who I can trust more.
On one hand I have a guy on the internet who doesn’t even know that von Braun had his history purged and was given a fake history by the US government to deceive the public about his actual personal history and was openly working with the US government when he appeared on Disney’s TV series. All of which just shows he has little grasp on historical facts.OROn the other hand, I could trust Michael Barrier, an American historian who specializes in the history of animation and whose biography on Walt Disney is held to be one of the best ever produced.Yeah. This isn’t a hard decision to make.
I know what project paperclip is you dunce. Disney was a union-busting fashy but defend him all you want! Not my ass on the wrong side of the class war.
Correct. “The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney” by Michael Barrier is the best biography ever done on the man and it concludes that Walt was not in any way or form an anti-Semite. He also wasn’t anti-Black, as Floyd Norman talks about here: https://www.salon.com/2013/10/09/meet_floyd_norman_the_first_african_american_animator_at_disney_partner/
It’s rather mind boggling that Home On The Range *isn’t* on this list, frankly.
Ah yes. Mickey and his Magic Broom.An early lesson in computer programming.
Yeah strange worlds isn’t great. The first fifteen minutes were all over the place jumping between set peices with little to no coherent art direction and a massive time skip.
Standatd subtle as a brick Disney messages aside, I would give it a B- parking it along side Disney’s “Princess and the Frog” which honestly should have been on your list more than “Black Cauldron” or “Sword in the Stone”.
The Black Cauldron is arguably Disney’s biggest flop when it comes to animated features; while it doesn’t match the losses posted by Treasure Planet or Strange World in terms of raw numbers, in the context of when it was released it’s very comparable, and unlike those other two films it very nearly led to the shuttering of Disney feature animation completely. Any list of Disney flops absolutely has to discuss The Black Cauldron, regardless of one’s feelings about its quality.
Financially on release, yes you are absolutly right.With it’s cult classic status however, I find it hard to judge it just on release. It’s iconic right up their with Fantasia in a love it or hate it way.
B- is about right for The Princess and the Frog. Needed more memorable songs, and I frankly didn’t care for the story. I have a bias against turning- characters-into-animals plots, as seen in everything from Brother Bear to Brave, to as recently as Soul. The only time I can think I liked it was for The Emperor’s New Groove.
Sword in the stone is a classic, fight me.
Why are millions of dollars always described as “cool”?
I’m not the target audience for Strange World, and if I was a parent I’m not sure I’d bother with movie theaters when I know it’ll pop up on Disney+ in like two weeks or whatever… but I’m still generally aware when animated movies are coming out in theaters. I didn’t see any promotion for Strange World. That right there’s why it flopped.
I remember seeing Fantasia 2000, didn’t know it was a flop. It’s definitely not as good as the first one though.
Fantasia 2000 was my first ever IMAX movie, (I think the format was somewhat new at the time?) and it sure seemed like a big deal. Theater was packed, saw promotions everywhere….I’m a little surprised myself.
Actually I think I remember seeing it in IMAX myself.
The Black Cauldron computer game was awesome, though. That little pig, Hen Wen, following you around everywhere.
I loved Sword in the Stone, The Rescuers Down Under, and The Black Caldron.
Princess and the Frog also was a bomb at the box office, it should be here on this list.
I know what you meant but it’s weird hearing a movie about talking animals described as having “no fantasy elements”. Let the world have the word “fantasy” back, genre nerds.
Strange World’s biggest problem was the dismal ad campaign. I’m going to call the Chapek effect. I didn’t see one trailer/commercial for it until just a few days before it released (and I have kids so it’s not like I wouldn’t have noticed). And then when I started seeing articles about how it bombed, I was like, “Wait…that was a Disney movie?”
Rescuers Down Under was groundbreaking with respect to its digital animation. It’s also a gorgeous and entertaining film that was scuttled by the studio. I think it doesn’t get enough credit at all
There was also a huge recession going on then….Nobody was taking their kids to see movies then except for Christmas really…Home videos was where it was at!
Man Fantasia is just one of those old Disney movies I have wanted to watch, but I have tried more times than I can count and fall asleep every single time lol.
I don’t know what it says about me that Fantasia 2000, Treasure Planet, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, et al are actually among my favorite Disney movies.
I would love to see Strange world in theater. It seem to be a pretty movie snd I love scifi. But its nowhere here in Quebec city.
Black Cauldron bombed because they made the white cauldron political!!11 /internet chuds if they existed in the 80s
Actually the general rule is a film has to make almost 3 times it’s budget to be considered profitable. So no almost none of these “broke even” at the BO. Unless you’re counting the constant rereleases and home video market. Not to mention merchandising.
Like, half of these are genuine classics. This article is moronic.