UPDATE 3/29: Well! Now Home has gone and ruined my entire beautiful narrative arc by wildly outperforming even the most rosily optimistic predictions during its opening weekend, with an estimated $54 million. With that total in its pocket, even under the worst imaginable scenario, it should still glide past $100 million in the United States with ease - $150 mil is certainly in play - and combined with its sterling overseas performance so far, it shouldn't have any problem turning a profit for DreamWorks. The day of reckoning has been put off.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. As DreamWorks's only 2015 release, the studio won't be able to build up any momentum, but it gives the powers that be a good chance to breathe easily and take a good long time to re-work their future plans. Hopefully the right lessons are learned from this ("Non-white girls can sell movies, too") and not the easier wrong ones ("That absolute piece of crap made us money! We don't ever have to try again!), and hopefully it will encourage this and all other animation companies to experiment a little bit more with new properties instead of just retrenching to sequels every time someone says "boo". -Tim
Tim here. Last week, we took a tour through the peak years of DreamWorks Animation, during which time the House That Jeffrey Katzenberg's Hatred of His Old Bosses at Disney Built established itself as the biggest gorilla in American feature animation. And as 2010 dawned, the studio was on the verge of a remarkable achievement. That year, DreamWorks released three feature-length theatrical films – the most any studio had ever produced. It proved to be a great year to do so, an extraordinary year for animation: five of the year's top ten films at both the domestic and worldwide box office were animated, an unmatched record.
That, of course, is exactly the problem. Having perfected a factory for producing animated features that anyone could follow, DreamWorks was as responsible as any studio for the glut of animation that hit in 2009 and has continued largely unabated ever since. By making its products too ubiquitous, the studio was making them routine and increasingly easy to ignore.
Not that it was apparent from the first of the year's releases, How to Train Your Dragon, which netted DreamWorks its best reviews ever and remains its highest-grossing Stateside release without the word "Shrek" in the title. [More...]
It was, surely not coincidentally, the studio's first truly director-driven project; having been run out of Disney by John Lasseter, Chris Saunders and Dean DeBlois were given largely free rein at DreamWorks to make the movie they way they wanted. The result was a terrific artistic triumph; in any year that Pixar hadn't sent its most beloved characters hurtling into the flames of Toy Hell and making every one cry for 20 straight minutes, it surely would have won the Best Animated Feature Oscar.
Only two months after Dragon, though, DreamWorks got a dent. Not a big dent. But when Shrek Forever After opened, it only grossed $238 million domestically. That's still more than Dragon, and its $752 million worldwide dwarfs the other film's take. It was also, however, a significant drop from Shrek the Third, a film that had been largely disliked. And thus, for the first time, DreamWorks could see the real proof that if they continued to churn out derivative crap, people would drift away. And drift they did, right over to the competition: new studio Illumination Entertainment exploded out of the gate with Despicable Me, a film that copied the DreamWorks formula down to a T, only making a film that was, generally speaking, simply better than most of what DreamWorks had been able to make. The results were felt immediately with the fall release of Megamind, which had the same basic hook – "root for the supervillain, who turns out to be a cuddly guy" – and turned a profit without making any real impact.
In 2011, the studio turned back to what they did best: sequels and brand expansion. And it's only here that the full force of DreamWorks's oversaturation and overstretching is revealed. For both of the films, summer's Kung Fu Panda 2 and falls Puss in Boots, a spin-off of the Shrek franchise, did muted business despite solid reviews (both were Oscar-nominated, the second and last time that DreamWorks competed with itself in the Best Animated Feature category). Kung Fu Panda 2 in particular is a confusing case: coming off of a successful and well-liked precursor, it only did around three-quarters of the first film's box office in the States and barely scraped above it worldwide, despite three years of significant expansion of international markets.
The muted performance of the 2011 slate brought the first rumblings of concern: after years of a happy partnership with Paramount, the studio began hunting around in 2012 for a new distributor. They signed a deal with 20th Century Fox in August, by which time they had premiered Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, and all seemed well: the film became the seventh DreamWorks release to crack $200 million in the U.S., while nestling in as their third highest-grossing film worldwide, behind only Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third. But any sense of security was about to be horribly undone: with little motivation to push it very hard, Paramount dropped the holiday release Rise of the Guardians into theaters with very little enthusiasm, and the odd conceit – The Avengers with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, essentially – and heavily stylized designs didn't draw in audiences. The film became DreamWorks's lowest-grossing CGI film in the States, barely clawing its way above $100 million, and it triggered the first round of what would eventually become a familiar sight: DreamWorks executives attempting to formulate, in public, a new plan to move forward in the hopes of keeping their increasingly shaky investors from bailing.
2013 and the Fox deal opened brightly: Chris Saunders made his second feature for the studio, this time co-directing with Kirk De Micco, The Croods. Though not a Zeitgeist-tapping hit at the level of Shrek or even Dragon, the film turned a nice profit and met with reasonable enthusiasm. As spring turned to summer, DreamWorks began to announce its plans to diversify: having already found success with TV spinoffs of How to Train Your Dragon and Madagascar, it was looking to increase its online and television presence, with the vanguard of that process being a new deal with Netflix to produce several different exclusive cartoon series for the site. All this optimism hit a brick wall in August, when the company released Turbo, an uninspiring hybrid of Pixar's Cars and Ratatouille starring Ryan Reynolds as the voice of a snail. Though critics weren't terribly hard on it (and they should have been), the film tanked: with a paltry $83 million domestically, it was the studio's lowest-grossing film in ten years, and its overseas performance still couldn't force it into profitability. DreamWorks was forced to take the first of several write-downs, and to make matters worse, the very first project of their Netflix deal was a Turbo spin-off cartoon.
It was at this point clear to anyone who cared to pay attention that the guiding minds of the studio had no real creative ideas, and the company's dire 2014 proved this impression. Spring saw the release of Mr. Peabody & Sherman, a nostalgia piece based on a property that nobody in the under-12 target audience had ever heard of; summer's How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Thanksgiving's Penguins of Madagascar were both following TV series that had done much to dilute the audience's eagerness for more theatrical adventures. Dragon 2 ended up profiting enough internationally to recoup its budget – its chilly American reception remains baffling eight months later, as does its more recent Oscar loss – but even the overseas love for Madagascar couldn't help Penguins out of the red. In 24 months, only two of the studio's five releases had turned a profit, and two of the failures had been dire.
In the wake of Penguins's failure, DreamWorks executives massively restructured their studio, leaving a staggering number of animators to face an increasingly cutthroat job market. Meanwhile, they retained the creative minds who dealt with this crisis by cutting several of their most promising projects in development to focus on sequels to films that already underperformed (Kung Fu Panda 3, How to Train Your Dragon 3), odd kiddie flicks that seem determined not to do any business outside of America (Boss Baby, Captain Underpants), and yet another nostalgia project for people in their 40s (Trolls – yes, as in the little dolls with Technicolor hair). From a business standpoint, The Croods 2 is the studio's only in-development project that has any strong justification (though I imagine Dragon 3 at least will turn a neat profit); from a creative standpoint, do any of them?
And thus we arrive at the impending release of Home (which was swapped with Penguins in the hope of boosting the latter's box-office success), the solitary DreamWorks feature of 2015, and a film that looks almost universally appalling: the solitary nice thing anyone has to say about it is that its protagonist is a tween girl of color, a unicorn-like rarity in kids' films. Pre-release tracking suggests it's going to be another costly flop. Thus does the focus on business smarts at the expense of thinking about what people might enjoy seeing reach its natural conclusion. Let us leave DreamWorks now on the precipice of another write-down and another stock tumble, and a future supported almost solely through merchandising and TV. For all that I've disliked and outright hated DreamWorks through the years, I find this sad. Things were more interesting when DreamWorks was thriving; between 2001 and 2010, it almost single-handedly shaped the current landscape of commercial animation. As Home comes along to put yet another nail in its coffin, I can't help but feel an odd sense of loss that the cinema landscape is losing such a dominant voice, even if I've almost never liked the things that voice has said in the past.