An LA Times article broke the news this morning that Disney Animation is hanging up its princesses for the foreseeable future. Instead, it's got a movie about an outdated video game character in the works.
The death of the Disney princess comes from narrow market appeal, according to the article. After The Princess and the Frog failed to perform at box office, Disney renamed its Rapunzel flick Tangled and shifted focus to the male character in the story as a way to attract a much bigger audience than the standard army of little girls.
This is where Disney takes a note from the video games industry -- because what other business is as obsessed with finding a sequel-maker? As the video games industry discovered, pumping out sequels isn't about repeat performances (like The Little Mermaid 2, Cinderella 2, and The Rescuers Down Under) so much as it's about finding a character or an icon to carry a series of stories, like Lara Croft. Disney's already experimenting with this formula using Mater from Cars. The Larry-The-Cable-Guy-in-truck-form has a spin-off DVD and a feature role in a sequel despite the fact that Cars is one of Pixar's lowest-reviewed films.
So now we've got Reboot Ralph, a 3D animated movie about a video game character "who's been left behind by the march of technology." It doesn't sound as gender-neutral as Tangled, but it is reaching out to an audience that currently fuels an industry worth as much as $44 billion by some accounts. And it certainly sounds like something the reboot-obsessed video game industry can relate to.
Tangled hits theaters November 24. Reboot Ralph is listed for a 2013 release date on the Internet Movie Database.
Source:
Disney Animation is closing the book on fairy tales [LA Times]
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Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Monday, November 22, 2010