The second trailer for Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea is now playing in Japanese theatres. This is the formal preview, and should provide enough incentive to get everyone excited for next month. Also, a new trailer aired this week on the NHK television network. I'll try my best to beg my secret sources for a copy to show. In any case, I'm sure we'll see the fan bootlegs making their way online sooner or later.
As for the American release, I'm still assuming a summer 2009 release, with the full backing of Pixar and the usual bullshit resistance from the Disney suits. Just to remind everyone, Howl's Moving Castle played on 202 screens in its first week in the US. Two hundred and two. That was chopped down to 37 screens for week two.
202. 37. Sigh.
4 comments:
Here's the Ponyo trailer: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dq-qoC5i3u4
Here is the Theater amounts for Spirited Away
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=spiritedaway.htm
It stared at 26 but then got 6 weeks at 100 - 150.
However, after it won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature it saw a big spike in Theaters to 700+ for 2 weeks then almost 500 for another. It actually made 1.8 Million in one weekend, which is impressive when all things are considered.
Here is the run of Howl's
http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=howlsmovingcastle.htm
Thanks for the links to BOM. That's the source I always use for box-office numbers. As you can probably guess, I was pouring over those numbers during Howl's run in American theatres.
It is true that Disney issued Spirited Away to more screens after its Oscar win, and that's a good thing. Good for them. But why, then, would the next Miyazaki picture - a world-famous filmmaker with an Academy Award - be given so little exposure? 200 screens is nothing. A standard theatrical release in this day and age means thousands of screens. Heck, 2000 screens now qualifies as a "limited release."
When you're looking at the numbers, the key is not the overall box-office totals, but the per-screen average. If you examine closely, you'll see that Howl's Moving Castle was a great hit. Remember, again, there was very little press and hype given to the movie; this was still the grass roots support of the steadily-growing fans. I knew this by examining the traffic to my main website. Howl's was a movie that the public wanted to see. But that dream was squashed.
Hmm...I should probably bump this up to a full-fledged blog post before I get too deep into this. Besides, I have some old Beatles records I want to sell off. They're the Capitol ones, don't worry ;)
Thanks for writing and joining in on the discussion, as always. Your support is always the thing that compells me to write more.
"and the usual bullshit resistance from the Disney suits. Just to remind everyone, Howl's Moving Castle played on 202 screens in its first week in the US. Two hundred and two. That was chopped down to 37 screens for week two."
Yeah, isn't it bizarre ? I thought the Disney corporation was all about Making Money ? So they had one of the greatest animated films of all time that had been fabulously successful at the box-office in Japan and they treat it like some rinky-dink 'art house' movie with a limited appeal , rather than designing a major marketing campaign to get large numbers of people into the theaters to see it.
Of course, they also sabotaged the last two or three of their own hand-drawn animated movies with lackluster , half-hearted marketing (Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range) , so why would they pull out the stops for Howl's Moving Castle ? (never mind whether those movies were any good , and none were even close to as good as Howl's , but you'd expect the corporation to at least TRY to market them competently , rather than just dumping them out there ) . At that time the people who ran Disney had basically accepted the "2D Animation is dead" meme (hell, Eisner practically started the "2D is dead" meme) so I guess it was inevitable that they would only give Howl's a token release.
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