Saturday, July 11, 2009

The $100 Million Club

Now with calorie-free Add On.

Ice Age 3 stomped over the century marker on Friday:

... [T]he third Ice Age movie ... consumed $8.7 million on Friday while evolving past the $100 million mark ...

As of Friday, IA3 has a worldwide gross of $252.4 million, 60% of the take coming from foreign venues. The producers claim a $90 million budget for the feature; if true, the third incarnation of the Adventures of the Wool-covered Elephants should be moving into the black right about now ...

Elsewhere on the domestic box office front, the phony Austrian Bruno collected $14.2 million to come in at #1, the animated epic Tranformers dropped 58% but already has $322.6 million in its steel gunny sack, and fourth place Public Enemies owns a total of $56.8 million.

Finally, The Proposal (#5 with a bullet) has also joined the $100 million club, having amassed $106.7 million to date.

Add On: The happy Austrian comes in first for the weekend, with $30.4 million. Transformers at #3 makes $24.2 million for a grand total of $339.2 million. And Ice Age 3?

Twentieth Century Fox’s holdover “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” did strong business in its second frame, grossing an estimated $28.5 million from 4,102 screens and jumping the $100 million mark domestically. Film, sporting a cume of $120.6 million, came in No. 2 for the frame.

IA3 dropped a mere 31.6% weekend to weekend, which of course bodes well for future box office health.   Far down the box office list, Monsters vs. Aliens moved up three notches to #20, earned $250,000, and now stands at $197.1 million. DWA is no doubt working to push the space creatures over the $200 million mark.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The 90 mil is accurate. Horton was 85 and IA2 was 80.

Why? The number of staff is (less than?) half of Pixar's and the facilities not as nice as Dreamworks. They dont have the amenities of some other places but they crunch their brains out to get the films done. They have less creative story control than they'd like (thanks Fox), but they do get nice bonuses if the film does well.

Anonymous said...

I've heard the turnover rate at Blue Sky is rather high, both because of lower-than-average wages, and greater-than-average crunches. Any truth to that?

If they do have high turnover, it hasn't seemed to have affected their output.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, they lost most of their veterans after Horton. But theres always an influx of new talent, though now less of a base to mentor them.

Yes, the crunches are worse than other places. Expect 5-6 months of minimum 60 hour weeks. 70-80 for the last few months. The problem exists due to lack of staff in the pre-production phases (everyone is finishing up the previous film), everything gets pushed, and everyone scrambles to finish. Not to mention the rigs that run at 1-3 frames per second. Animation and lighting get hit the hardest.

From what I hear (Im not there anymore) the pay is getting more in line with the industry standard, and there are plans in place to help alleviate the crunch.

Anonymous said...

they are definitely more savvy than others when it comes to getting it done on a budget.

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