First Disney CG film - Chicken Little or Dinosaur?

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jamminjake245
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First Disney CG film - Chicken Little or Dinosaur?

Post by jamminjake245 »

Everyone is saying that Chicken Little will be the first fully CG movie from Disney. What about Dinosaur? I still remember watching commercials for it in 99' on the Disney channel for Movie Surfers where they would say, "This will be Disney's first own computer generated movie."
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Post by PatrickvD »

Dinosaur was not produced by Walt Disney Feature animation (the crew that started with Snow White etc etc) but by a studio Disney used to make the movie. ALSO, Dinosaur is not 100% CGI, it's a combination of computer animated characters and live action backgrounds. Chicken Little is 100% CGI and produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation.
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Post by dvdjunkie »

You beat me to the punch PatrickvD.........just what I was going to say.

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Post by eric89 »

Wasn't Dinosaur a flop? I remember everyone had made a big deal about it, but once it was released it was like it just floated away into the vault without any real "Disney" success in theaters or on VHS/DVD.
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Post by Luke »

eric89 wrote:Wasn't Dinosaur a flop? I remember everyone had made a big deal about it, but once it was released it was like it just floated away into the vault without any real "Disney" success in theaters or on VHS/DVD.
Not really. You can read <a href="http://www.ultimatedisney.com/dinosaur.html">here</a> and see <a href="http://www1.videobusiness.com/info/CA62 ... l">here</a> for more information on why it's silly to label it a flop, though many seem to do just that.
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Post by Lucylover1986 »

Just look at the box office mojo page for this movie:

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=dinosaur.htm

It made $350 million+ worldwide. That's pretty darn good.
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Post by eric89 »

Isn't it considered a flop because of the budget compared to the profit?
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Post by Mr. Toad »

It is not a flop monetarily or artistically.

Monetarily - 350 Mil is fine. Nothing wrong witht that.

Artistically - the beginning is great, the last third is fine but that middle third is just deadly boring. Killed the movie. So all in all OK/.
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Post by eric89 »

But, what was the profit compared to the budget for the movie. Wasn't it a very expensive movie for Disney? It was basically a live action and computer animated two film movie mushed together.
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Post by Luke »

eric89 wrote:But, what was the profit compared to the budget for the movie. Wasn't it a very expensive movie for Disney? It was basically a live action and computer animated two film movie mushed together.
If you read my review, or even just the second-to-last paragraph of the movie section, you'd already have your answer. :)
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Post by Paka »

eric89 wrote:But, what was the profit compared to the budget for the movie. Wasn't it a very expensive movie for Disney? It was basically a live action and computer animated two film movie mushed together.
Dinosaur was a glorious flop, even though the "official" production budget was about $127 million. This was a glossy number reported by the studio itself, and it doesn't add up. Not when you take into account the egregious incubation period, the construction/aquisition of brand new facilities, the purchase of tons of new equipment, and the film's convoluted story development... not to mention bloated executive paychecks and bonuses...

Anyhoo, I suggest you take the time to read this thread at Animation Nation, a board frequented by animation industry professionals. It's a smidgen old - from 2003 - but there's a lengthy discussion about Dinosaur's troubled production, as well as some fairly frank and brutally honest accounts of what working for the Mouse these days is really like. I'm not an incurably cynical person, but the stories accounted there certainly don't surprise me, and I doubt that they're fabricated.

More realistic estimates put Dinosaur's budget at at least $200-250 million, and that could very well be a conservative estimate. A post in another thread at AN from 2000 points out the implications of this amount, as well...
One of the formulas used is that a film has to gross 2.5 times its budget to go into profit. If that ($200 million) figure is correct, than the film would have to gross $500 million worldwide in order to make its first dollar of profit.

It's important to realize that there's a huge difference between the concept of profit and the concept of return on investment. Disney started spending money on Dinosaur in the mid '90's. Assuming the video does well next year, it will be about 6 years since Disney started investing money. Had they taken their money and put it in the bank, they would have done better than what they're going to realize on the Dinosaur film. Whatever profit they end up making on that film will be a very small percentage of what they invested.
Even taking the films' video sales into account, the film was far from a success. It was such a half-baked behemoth of a production, with so much money blown on its various incarnations over the years, that it would have had to make Lord of the Rings type numbers to provide a satisfactory return. O_o

Too bad the final product was so utterly mediocre, to say the least. :roll:
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Post by Fidget1234 »

Paka wrote:More realistic estimates put Dinosaur's budget at at least $200-250 million, and that could very well be a conservative estimate. A post in another thread at AN from 2000 points out the implications of this amount, as well...
Well...you were close...the animators I used to talk w/ @ the Studios told me that they put over 300 million into the movie. for the early-mid 90s that is quite a hefty budget. :o
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Post by Paka »

Fidget1234 wrote:Well...you were close...the animators I used to talk w/ @ the Studios told me that they put over 300 million into the movie. for the early-mid 90s that is quite a hefty budget. :o
LOL!!

Like I said, $200 to $250 million was a conservative estimate! ;) I've heard accounts of $300-$400 million being the actual money spent when all was said and done... and I don't find it hard to believe at all. :P
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Post by Wonderlicious »

Paka wrote:I'm not an incurably cynical person, but the stories accounted there certainly don't surprise me, and I doubt that they're fabricated.
Not incurably cynical? Okay, who's been to the Betty Ford Clinic for Un-American behaviour? ;)
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Post by Paka »

Wonderlicious wrote:Not incurably cynical? Okay, who's been to the Betty Ford Clinic for Un-American behaviour? ;)
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Post by Laura »

Well, I don't know how well "Dinosaur" did at the box office--but when my son got the DVD, he became hooked on it, and liked to put a quilt over his head and pretend to be a baby dinosaur hatching out of an egg! :) I liked the movie too, especially Della Reese's character--I believe her name is Eema? I haven't seen it in a while.
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Post by toonaspie »

Apparently it's being considered a member of the WFDA canon according to wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Di ... d_features

Still not sure what to think of this although I stopped caring ever since WDFA went into CGI animation.
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Post by SpringHeelJack »

I don't count it in the canon, since it was shoved in after the fact. It was never promoted as being in the canon, and it seems to have happened relatively recently. Plus, "Chicken Little" was a made a big deal of because it was WDFA's first CGI animated movie, so "Dinosaur" really can't be.
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Post by goofystitch »

I too was surprised when it was added to the cannon because I was under the impression that the division of Disney that made it, Disney's Secret Lab, was separate from WDFA. However, it was more of a branch of WDFA than a separate division. I am still torn as to whether or not it should or shouldn't be included. It is mostly animated, but the fact that it uses live action backgrounds is what holds me back from sticking it in with the rest. I know that most of the backgrounds as they appear in the film are very much altered, or even composites where several pieces of film are compiled into one background.
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Post by Kyle »

I liked the movie but yeah it wasted more money than it ended up earning.

my problem with it was it seemed like a land before time wanna be. I wish we could have seen the non talking version of the movie. probablly would have been better. the opening sequence alone proves that I think.

The movie seemed like more of a failed experiement than anything though.
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