Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Anyone else think that Wall.E will be the biggest hit of the summer?


I'm thinking the final worldwide take to be somewhere in the billion range?

5 comments:

Jordan said...

Sure, not because it will be the best movie of the summer (I suspect that will be Batman) but because Pixar has bottled the Disney "universal appeal" formula.

Disney's trick has always been to make movies that nobody can possibly object to seeing. I'm saying that in a nice way (even though, in traditional Disney hands, like in the fifties and sixties, it's basically a road to saccharine, reactionary tripe). Around the time of Little Mermaid, Disney basically had their own "Crisis on Infinite Earths"; they completely overhauled their formula and removed nearly all the cloying, Bing Crosby-style square-as-a-sugar-cube (not to mention racist, sexist, republican) tonality and replaced it with something much fresher and hipper.

But Michael Eisner turned out to be such an unbelievable, collossal prick that the whole thing sank into expensive, moronic oblivion over the next decade, until Pixar came along to save them.

Steve Jobs used NeXT to take over Apple and is now using Pixar to take over Disney. It's the same trick that the Image Comics guys used: Jim Lee used Image to (nearly) take over DC. That's how you do it. Build your own mousetrap, and trap the mouse.

JPX said...

I think the fact that the film is essentially dialogue free, thus giving it universal appeal, is brilliant.

The last time I went to Disney World (1992) I was standing next to this guy near the HOney I Shrunk the Kids movie experience. There were very few other people in the area where I was standing and when I finally looked at the guy I realized that it was Michael Eisner.

Jordan said...

I met him once, when he spoke at a fundraiser at the nonprofit I worked for about ten years ago. He's a prick.

Jordan said...

He's the reason there's no Roger Rabbit sequel: Spielberg couldn't deal with him. The board finally got rid of him because he was ruining their Pixar relationship, since Jobs and Lassiter couldn't deal with him either.

Classic arrogant, stupid, rich, lazy, beligerent American corporate fuckhead.

JPX said...

You mean, classic narcissist!

Malevolent

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