‘LEGO MOVIE’ CAN SAVE WARNER BROS. ANIMATION

One of the more amusing news bits to come out last week was the announcement that Walt Disney would be releasing a special “sing-along” version of Frozen into theaters on January 31st, 2014. What’s amusing is that it’s exactly one week before the debut of Warner Bros.’ The Lego Movie. Now a sing-along version of Frozen in its 11th weekend of release isn’t likely to make much of an impact, as it’s more of a cheap shot along the lines of Disney reissuing The Little Mermaid one weekend before the release of 20th Century Fox’s Anastasia back in 1997. But the move shows both that Disney is in a position to be punking their competitors again, as well as the fact that for the first time in forever (sorry), Warner Bros. Animation is actually a serious competitor. I had thirteen people at my house this Saturday, ages ranging from 2 to 65. Every single one of them wants to see The Lego Movie.

With strong buzz in all demographics and strong marketing, it stands to reason that The Lego Movie will likely be 2014′s first genuine four-quadrant blockbuster of the year. The best case scenario is something along the lines of the $70 million debut of Universal’s The Lorax back in March of 2012. Of course that film followed a months-long drought in family options, which Frozen‘s popularity and the surprising strength of The Nut Job ($40m in ten days) has somewhat mitigated thus far. The Lego Movie nonetheless smells like the kind of all-ages hit that “surprises” everyone by debuting with $60m+. But, and this is a very important “but”, with a budget of just $60m, The Lego Movie doesn’t need to open anywhere near my pie-in-the-sky predictions to be a success. An opening along the lines of $30m, on the same level as Cloudy With A Chance of Meabtalls and well below even the conventional wisdom $40-$45m predictions ala The Croods or Hotel Transylvania, will be just fine, with anything over that being tantamount to gravy.

What’s more important than the individual success of The Lego Movie is the health of its distributor. Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) may be among the titans in the realm of big-budget fantasy franchises, but they have seriously lagged behind their competitors in terms of big-screen animation. 20th Century Fox arguably jump-started the “Let’s all take on the Mouse House!” wave with Anastasia ($139m worldwide) in late 1997, with DreamWorks Animation debuting Antz ($171m) and Prince of Egypt ($218m) the following year. Warner Bros.’ response shot at glory was the maligned and forgotten Quest For Camelot ($22 million) in summer 1998 and the anemic The King and I ($11m) in 1999. I remember seeing the trailers for King and I and Prince of Egypt back-to-back and the level of difference in, well, everything was striking.

We all love Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant today, but if you saw it during its brief and small ($23m) theatrical run in August 1999, you were quite possibly by yourself (I basically was). Going back even further, they failed to capitalize on their television renaissance, giving Batman: Mask of the Phantasm a theatrical release in Christmas 1993 but failing to market it into an event or even screen it at night during opening weekend. Cue its $1.5 million debut and $6.7m total (I too was nearly by myself for that one on Christmas day). Warner Bros. Animation was having an incredible rebirth via its kid-centric afternoon and Saturday morning line-up (Batman: The Animated Series, Animaniacs, etc.), but they were and still are floundering when it came to theatrical features.

It wasn’t all bad. Warner Bros. scored in 1996 with the NBA-meets Looney Tunes adventure Space Jam ($230 million worldwide) in 1996 while Happy Feet scored an Oscar for Best Animated Feature and $384m worldwide in 2006. The Polar Express kick-started the modern 3D age in 2004 while scoring $365m and becoming something of a perennial holiday favorite (seeing the film in IMAX 3D, completely unaware of how amazing it would look, still remains one of the great movie going experiences of my life). TMNT was a solid hit ($95m), even if it didn’t jump-start a new Ninja Turtles franchise in 2007, while Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride earned $117m in 2005. And I will never forgot the shock I felt after checking into ShowbizData and seeing that The first Pokémon movie had earned $10m on its first day in November 1999 ($163m on a $30m budget, natch).

But Happy Feet 2 was a too-expensive miss in 2010 ($150 million, but on a $130m budget) while Looney Tunes: Back In Action was terrific but unprofitable in theaters ($68m on an $80m budget) during its 2003 run. They missed pretty hard in 2002 with The Powerpuff Girls Movie ($16m), which lacked the charm of the show and spent 75 minutes explaining an origin that the show explained in 20 seconds. Osmosis Jones was a costly miss in 2001 ($14m). The Ant Bully was one of seemingly a million zany talking animal animated films in 2006, and it remains the most forgotten, having earned $55m on a $50m budget. Zack Snyder’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole was surprisingly thoughtful and absolutely beautiful, but it earned $140m on an $80m budget in late 2010. Star Wars: The Clone Wars made $65m on a budget of around $15m, a big hit, but a victim of scathing reviews and overshadowed by the insanely good television series for which it served as a five-part pilot.

There are arguably as many hits as misses, but the misses (often involving really good movies) are big, and the Dream Factory finds itself in 2014 lacking any real explicit identity or brands when it comes to theatrical animation. They thrive via television (The Looney Tunes Show is terrific, like Curb Your Enthusiasm for kids) and their copious DTV output (they make so many DCAU features they can drop one into Target with no advertising just for fun), but they are currently all-but-irrelevant in the realm of theatrical animated features. Their hits and misses are similar in that they have left Warner Bros. without any real footprint in the theatrical animation business. Meanwhile their competitors have flourished.

Over the last 15 years, DreamWorks became a genuine titan in the animation business, while Sony found success in films like Monster House and eventually Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and Hotel Transylvania along with The Smurfs and the Aardman releases. Universal struck gold with Illumination (Despicable Me, Hop, The Lorax) and even Fox survived the shuttering of Fox Animation after the disaster of Titan A.E. ($36m on a $75m budget) to thrive with Blue Sky Animation (Ice Age, Robots, Rio) and they are now distributing DreamWorks Animation releases to boot. Paramount excelled with under DreamWorks from 2006 to 2012, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here. And yes, Disney has done okay for its self with and without Pixar. As the smaller distributors take their shots at animated films (Hoodwinked from Weinstein Company, The Nut Job from Open Road, Battle For Terra from Lionsgate, etc.) one of the very biggest movie studios around still lacks its own brand and/or identity in the realm of theatrical animation.

That’s what The Lego Movie (produced by Village Roadshow, Lego, and Lin Pictures and distributed by Warner Bros.), can do if it hits as big as I’m expecting. The Lego Movie is important in terms of being profitable for those who funded and distributed it and in terms of launching a potential franchise of theatrical Lego movies as well as a testing ground for methods of brand-mixing (IE – the first film has Batman, Wonder Woman, and Michelangelo among others). But it is also important as it will give Warner Bros. a shot at a real identity in the one realm in which they have struggled for twenty years. As a fan of the studio, as well as a proponent of the idea that more animation competition means better animated features from all parties, I can only say that it’s about darn time.

So what say you? Are you excited for The Lego Movie? Are you other family members interested in the picture? Did you actually see Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and/or The Iron Giant in theaters? Why didn’t any of you remind me last December that the 20th anniversary of Batman: The Mask of the Phantasm was about to turn 20 years old so I could do a retrospective? Sorry, unrelated digression. Are you a little annoyed that Warner Bros. didn’t put out a Wonder Woman character poster? Sorry, that’s a tangent related to a future piece.