Rich Ross is worried.
Ross has recently been appointed Chairman of Walt Disney Studios. He took over from the unsuccessful Dick Cook. Cook, who worked at Disney for thirty-eight-years, has left a lot on Ross’s plate. Mergers. Projects. Problems.
Ross is looking at one of those problems.
A rough cut sits in his office. It’s from Disney’s subsidiary studio, ImageMovers Digital. IMD’s projects are all about motion capture animation, a technology that hasn’t exactly moved audiences.
Their last film was an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. It cost $200 million but only made a small profit. Far too close a margin for Ross’s liking.
Their latest project is a concern. It’s burned through money. It’s about a kid and his mother, aliens and Mars. It needs to do better than the Dickens effort or Disney is in trouble.
Ross plays the rough cut. Concern turns to shock, then to horror.
Disney is in big trouble.
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On March 11th 2011, Disney released Mars Needs Moms. It would become one of the biggest flops in movie history.
Mars was produced on a budget of $150 million. Marketing for the film could have cost as much as $25 million. The gross for its first weekend in America…$6.9 million.
Domestic box office takings eventually reached a paltry $21 million. It did even worse overseas. All told, Mars made a total net loss of $140 million.
How did this happen?
In truth, there was a combination of factors. Motion capture technology, where a person’s movements are recorded by sensors and then animated, is extremely expensive.
Zemeckis pioneered its use in the likes of Monster House, The Polar Express and Beowolf. But the results were mixed.
While James Cameron’s Avatar successfully transformed Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana into members of the alien Na’vi tribe, IMD struggled to replicate natural movement and expression. This is clearly evident in the animation of Mars Needs Moms.
The characters look peculiar, be they human or alien. Their facial responses seem involuntary and fake. With animation this poor, no wonder audiences couldn’t empathise with the characters. We have been spoilt by years of magnificence from Pixar, IMD just can’t compete.
Mars also contains some fundamental flaws. The script is awful. There’s no humour, intelligence or emotional depth. The characters are poorly conceived and hackneyed.
Inquisitive kid, stressed mother, video game nerd, and strict female-in-charge, all make an appearance. When you add in miscast voice talent like Joan Cusack, it never stood a chance.
Disney knew that it was going to fail well before its completion. Soon after Ross saw that early cut, Disney shut down ImageMovers Digital and cancelled all its projects.
While Ross was proven right on Mars, this wisdom was clearly lacking when it came to Disney’s next catastrophe John Carter. Another film based on the Red Planet, Carter was a gargantuan flop in March 2012. It ultimately cost Ross his job.
It seems that while women may come from Venus, box office flops definitely come from Mars.
