Basically, the only modern studio consistently putting out stop motion animation movies, is Laika Studios. And yet, Laika has only had one financially successful movie, Coraline from 2009, while all their other movies have under performed.
However, Laika is currently led and owned by Travis Knight, son of Phil Knight, the owner of Nike. This has enabled Knight to continually bank roll Laika whenever they under perform, essentially making the entire stop motion animation film industry a nepo baby’s pet project.
That being said, this is actually a positive story, and reminiscent of how artists previously would be financially supported by wealthy benefactors.
Are you not counting claymation? Because i’m sure that Wallace and grommit would like a word.
Aren’t all artists dependent of some rich guys or rich guy’s wifes?
I saw an art exhibition recently, I am not able to buy a 200€ pillow.
Me when people forget about Wallace and Gromit.
Would you like a spot of wensleydale old chum?
Speaking of propping things up - Wensleydale were propped up by Wallace & Gromit.
Yeah because the truth is it’s actually pretty rubbish cheese. I’m allowed to say that, you can’t, but I can.
Yarg best cheese or a blue west country Brie.
Lancashire is generally the better white crumbly, but there are certainly good examples of both
Bought some back when I lived in Scotland and Somerfield had a deal on multiple blocks of cheese. Didn’t finish it.
Yes I heard they were failing until they got the free advertising. Me I’m a Y Fenni fan.
If you have the one with cranberries, yes!
If you have one without cranberries, also yes!
Cranberries, and other bits of crap, don’t belong in cheese. Have them with your cheers by all means, but not in it. I like tomatoes and olives with a bit of cheese but I won’t be buying a cheese that has formed some perverted union with them.
Yes
Sorry, the cat ate it.
i heard about this on a podcast. it is great news for stop-motion, and considering how many shitty rich people there are, it’s nice to know there’s a couple good ones promoting art.
Also their movies are good and all but one of their movies made tens of millions of dollars.
for stop-motion, a very niche art-form, making 10-130 million dollars profit per film is laudable.
went too big with missing link though, which i haven’t seen yet.
breaking even with stop motion is laudable. because like we won awards with our films but i think we earned like 5 grand total. we spent way more than that over the years on tacos for the crew alone.
Exactly, making $100 million profit on stop-motion is like feverishly, lovingly crafting a bespoke hot air balloon with a thousand discarded model airplane kits and then realizing you’ve somehow survived landing on the moon.
I don’t know if motion animation is the same as other types of films, but for most of the industry you need box office sales to be double of the film budget for it to be considered profitable. Mainly due to marketing budgets and the huge percentage of profit that theaters get for the first few weeks of a film’s release.
It’s pretty different from live action according to creators and producers, it’s such a small market and stop motion is so difficult to explain and get off the ground and promote that financial expectations are much more realistic.
You’re right that if a live-action movie costs $100 million to make grosses $180 million, the producers are upset, but that’s a greedy, ego-driven convention of the modern studio system, they are still making tens of millions of dollars before everything on the back end is added in.
The stop-motion world has a more realistic perspective on production and the artists love every single piece of art they create, so also making $40 million as evidence that their art style can succeed in mainstream culture is the cherry on top of any project that even gets to be fully produced.
It’s more that if a movie costs $100 million to make, it’s usually $100 million in marketing. So it would need to make $200 million to break even. Making $180 million means someone lost $20 million dollars, so I wouldn’t really call it greedy. If the movies are not making the money then they’d need to just start reducing scope or just hope someone will keep bank rolling them.
That’s what studios publicly lament about without going into detail. Between streaming, retail and merchandising alone, they’re making their money back.
Marketing campaigns are not bankrupting movie profits.
If a studio makes 180 box office on a 100 million dollar production and they say they’ve lost 80 mil through marketing, they are pulling your leg.
“ah yeah, first quarter my team only made 23 points, oh well, thats the game.”
No, there are three other quarters that the studio isn’t talking about because it reduces their future negotiating leverage.
Of course studios want more money, but studios aren’t losing money on movies that get close but don’t tip the magic number of “double the budget”
If you want to count a whole year, then yes it can technically be made up by other movies down the line for the whole studio, but it won’t change the fact that the movie would have been a failure, that’s how budgets work. The same goes for pretty much any business that has projects or quarters.
They aren’t talking about it being made to by other movies, they’re saying the movie continues to make money for a long time after it’s first week. To give a famous example: in the 90s the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld was declared to be a massive financial flop based on its first week(s) performance in US cinemas, but once you account for worldwide figures and VHS sales it was actually one of the most profitable movies of the decade.
That is very true, but won’t that happen way after the release? That’s usually when these headlines happen.
no, classifying a picture that makes an $80 million dollar profit as a “failure” is factually incorrect, albeit a useful tactic for studios and headline writers.
making an 80% profit is a success in any business, and a triumph in most businesses; that’s how budgets wotk.
i want to note for the nonfinancial types: that’s profit, not revenue. profit is what you have left of your revenues after your costs.
Any picture that makes any profit (and that profit can be someone buying you tacos once because they liked your film on youtube, so long as they’ve bought you enough tacos) is a success.
Hell, any film that gets a screening outside the filmmakers’ social circles is a success. That means someone liked it enough to share it. Have I moved the goalposts enough that I can consider myself a film success because I do, I’m just playing badminton rather than football.
I would have to think no stop motion film is spending anything near that much on marketing. I’ve never even heard of a few of these. That double rule seems more applicable to big summer blockbusters.
huge percentage of profit that theaters get for the first few weeks of a film’s release.
This is backwards. Theaters actually get very little percentage early on in the release and only get more later. Most early profits go to the film studio/publisher. Or at least this was how it worked ore-Covid. Maybe it’s different now.
And to explain your comment a bit more, the production budget doesn’t include the very real costs of marketing, distribution, and any back-end royalties calculated from the gross. Plus generally speaking, the movie is financed by lenders and production companies that will need to be repaid with interest, too.
If you’ve got a $50 million movie and you spend $10 million on marketing/distribution and promised 10% of the gross to people, and the theaters are keeping 10% of the gross, getting a $75 million box office breaks even ($7.5 million to royalties, $7.5 million to theaters, $10 million to marketing/distribution). And that’s assuming nothing lost to interest/financing/inflation.
Side note: generally, theaters don’t get much in the first few weeks. It’s only when a movie shows longer than 3 weeks that the theater starts getting a bigger and bigger cut of the gross.
Wow, I usually keep track of their films as I like stop motion, but I wasn’t aware Missing Link existed at all, and it came out 7 years ago!
I also didn’t hear about it until last year, and I don’t I have any memory of seeing previews or promotion for the film.
Ive seen all of these but Missing link too. Watched them with my young son, we loved all of these movies. theyre all gems and you can see the art. I love hearing all this about it, freaking neat
That’s very cool to hear, cross-generational appreciation.
$418.5M profit on $60M budget, over four movies. $100M profit per movie
I don’t think that table is formatted correctly, I can’t imagine it was $60 million for all four movies. yea, the budget for each is listed around $60 million.
Was that the budget of all of them, or each individually?
table says together. I didn’t look further because who would be stupid enough to format a table like that if that’s not what they meant
Wikipedia. They often combine rows in a column if it’s all the same, even if they’re independent amounts.
I now regret donating to Wikipedia
That’s not how tables work unless they specify it is a totals column.
which ISO spec is that?
Which standard were you referring to when you made your conclusion?
Not 60 each? 418 from 240?
the table says $60M budget over four movies, not per movie
For the other movies, while they dont meet Hollywood standards of success, they still succeeded. If you spend $60 mil employing people for 2 or 3 years, and are doing what you love, and it pays you back $60 mil to do it again, that’s success. Even with the flip in there, the others covered it. As long as they break even, it bankrolls the next movie.
What do you mean „financially successful“? The movie Kubo from 2016 had more revenue than budget. Is that not successful?
It is a damn good movie btw.
https://bombreport.com/yearly-breakdowns/2016-2/kubo-and-the-two-strings/
Breakdown here.
No, it was a loss.
Isn’t that standard Hollywood accounting?
E.g. Return of the Jedi never made a profit either, on paper
I love Hollywood accounting. We collectively acknowledge it’s a very real thing because we are all not dumb but at the same time whenever we don’t agree with something we can also simply use it as a crutch.
Now that said you may be right, but you may also be wrong. Who knows? 🤷♂️
Ah, so basically Marketing is not included in the budget. And theaters take a big cut from the revenue.
Yep. Things we normally don’t look at when budget to revenue conversations happen.
I think about this scene so much whenever I’m doing a project
Sounds like the type of things normal dudes say when asked what they’d do if they won the lottery. Maybe Travis is a normal dude under the nepotism?
I think that’s what the last section of the post was referencing
yeah, the
reminiscent of how artists previously would be financially supported by wealthy benefactors.
i need to find myself a wealthy benefactor who likes [music form not appreciated outside one town in the eastern US and i like where i live dammit]
Aardman also produces stop-motion, so it is untrue that Laika is alone.
Not such a positive story for Will Vinton, who had a hostile takeover of his studio, and then was fired and replaced by the new owner’s son.
i was trying to forget the Will Vinton fiasco. I had a friend there.
I mean at least he’s doing something productive with his wealth. That puts him insanely far ahead of most wealth babies.
‘Propping up the stop motion film industry’ is quite the statement. Aardman Animaton has been releasing feature length stop motion movies since 2000 and all have done very well. Also Laika only worked on Corpse Bride of Tim Burton’s multiple very successful stop motion movies.
Aardman Animations: excuse me?
i don’t know the full story but iirc that was how the band Supertramp stayed afloat until they were successful, patronage from some rich guy
Funny timing I just saw a trailer for Wildwood and it looks SICK
I liked Kubo and the Two Strings a lot.
However, Mathew McConaughey? He was a very strange choice for voice talent in that film. It did not fit the aesthetic at all, he stuck out like a sore thumb. That southern drawl thing he’s got in a movie that has primarily Asian characters? Well all right all right all right.
Thank you! I hated his voice for that character. Love the movie, but I feel that was such a mistake.
huh. i loved the movie but i don’t remember him in it. now i’m wondering if i watched it in a language other than english (my first choice would have been vietnamese but that’s just because i don’t think i’ve watched any movies made by the vietnam film industry. I should fix that next week) with subtitles on, simply to have the audio’s aesthetic match the video’s.
Isn’t Aardman (shaun the sheep, wallace & gromit) still consistently put out stopmotion? Or are they just cheating the visual style with 3d animation?
They’ve got an ongoing show aimed at preschoolers called The Very Small Creatures. My 4 year old watches it occasionally. It’s simple but cute.
Timmy Time and later Shaun the Sheep were staples for my toddler 4-5 years ago.
Yeah, Aardman are very much still stop motion (with a few tiny cheats, the stadium audience in Early Man and the sea in Pirates on an Adventure with Scientists).
Aardman has had a CG division since the mid-90s. Flushed Away was their first all-CG feature, followed by Arthur Christmas. Pirates! in an Adventure With Scientists was intended to be fully CG but, at the request of Sony, it was changed to stop-motion with extensive CG augmentation.
Pirates on an Adventure with Scientists
damn, that’s a better title than the US got
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_In_an_Adventure_with_Scientists!
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (released outside the UK as The Pirates! Band of Misfits) is a 2012 stop-motion animated swashbuckler comedy film directed by Peter Lord and written by Gideon Defoe, based on his 2004 novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates!_in_an_Adventure_with_Communists
The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists is the third book in The Pirates! series by Gideon Defoe to feature his hapless pirate crew. It was published in 2006 by Orion Books (ISBN 0-297-84867-4).[1]
This book follows the adventures of the Pirate Captain and his crew through Paris and London—accompanied by Karl Marx and his sidekick Friedrich Engels—as they attempt to clear the communists’ good name after it is sullied by Richard Wagner and his malevolent benefactor, Friedrich Nietzsche. The fictionalized version of Nietzsche wears a large mechanical exoskeleton, and plots to take over Europe so he can get a girlfriend.
woaw
