What are, historically, some of the worst failures in animated films, and did they deserve to fail as hard as they did?

What are, historically, some of the worst failures in animated films, and did they deserve to fail as hard as they did?

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Black Cauldron
Treasure Planet
Disney's Atlantis
Food Fight
Any Don Bluth movie between American Tail and Anastasisa IIRC

>Black Cauldron
>Treasure Planet
>Disney's Atlantis
These ones for sure didn't deserve to fail. None of them were perfect, but they were all really good.

That's what happens when you go up against Harry Potter and Die Hard.

Anastasia wasn't that much of a success though

Everything on this list was awesome and deserved to do much, much better than it did. Except Food Fight obviously

Their target audience couldn't go see either

this movie was fucking amazing

why do sci-fi / adventure animated movies bomb so often?

Their target audience couldn't go see Harry Potter?

Made under $39 million globally on a $150 million budget

And failed so hard it made the company makingt the John Carter movie retitle it to remove "Mars" from the title because they feared people might associate it with Mars needs Moms

Black Cauldron was fucked by its production. You can tell while watching it that it felt like no one really cared to be working on it.

Katzenberg with yet another slam dunk

...

>Die Hard

Sorry, it was actually Die Another Day.

Delgo.

And yeah, it deserved it. The threads about it when it came out were gold. The stories surrounding its failure are hilarious.

Treasure Planet and Atlantis just came at the wrong time, user. CGI was the Big New Thing, and these movies took a different direction to the musical fare Disney often had.

To elaborate on the CGI thing;

1998 - A Bug's Life
1999 - Toy Story 2
2001 (Jun) - Atlantis
2001 (Nov) - Monsters Inc
2002 - Treasure Planet
2003 - Finding Nemo
2004 - The Incredibles

TP and Atlantis hit right in the centre of Pixar's golden age. The only animated Disney movie to completely escape Pixar's clutches around 2000 was Lilo and Stitch.

Emperor's New Groove is now remembered pretty fondly, but did very poorly in the box office compared to Disney's 90's movies (it's total worldwide gross ended at less than $170m, less than Atlantis).

Be fair now. This one is actually very well animated, and fun to look at. It's just that the story and characters are crap, having been erased and rewritten a dozen times as the production changed hands over the years. This is a sad "could-have-been", not a terrible flop.

How did Road To El Dorado fare at the time?

Absolute flop.

Even ENG managed to make more than it's budget back.

El Dorado costed ~90-100m, it made something around 75m

It also came out after TS2, but it's problems were probably more related to the lack of the Disney trademark and less kiddy humor

>The stories surrounding its failure are hilarious.
Tell them to me, that looks like it would be an interesting tale.

I think we can all agree that this is one of the most tragic examples of "animated films set up to fail" in history.
$3.6 million. That's all it made in the box office, just barely a tenth of its budget. All thanks to the mess caused by the Time Warner/Turner merge.

wasn't that the first movie after pretty much the entire animation department walked out because Disney payed them crap?

I still want a blu ray of this

>one of the most tragic examples... in history
You wanna fuck the cat, we get it.

More or less. After a certain point they said fuck it and pushed the movie to completion using any employees they could scoop up. It was pretty much the last Disney movie to have that "classic" look to it before stuff like Aladdin and Little Mermaid were made.

Different guy, but the film's actually pretty good. It's not the best movie ever, but it certainly didn't deserve to get shafted as badly as it did. It's certainly worth a watch.

None of the films mentioned so far compare to the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It literally killed one of the biggest companies in gaming.

There's more to animated films than Disney, it's not like they ever were at risk of running out of money whenever one of their films failed.

>Spirits Within
God, what the fuck was Square thinking?

Seconding this, sounds interesting.
>series of fantasy games which sometimes has a sci fi undercurrent
>lol it's all sci fi, minus arguably the spoooy ghost aliens and that Gaia thing
The movie itself was alright I guess but why they slapped the Final Fantasy label on I'll never know. Also that digital actress idea was awful.

>Also that digital actress idea was awful.
well considering japan has digital singers it wasn't too far fetched.

>this was directed by H. G. Wells' grandson

Not Square, it was mostly Sakaguchi's project which is why he voluntarily left Squaresoft in 2003, not long after the movie came out. Shame too because I like Spirits Within.

>It's just that the story and characters are crap
You what

>no mention of Titan A.E.
you had one job Sup Forums

Basically the guy kept aiming for the stars while employing people with more heart than skills. I don't remember too much more in-depth, but the story of making Delgo is much more tragic and endearing than the actual story in Delgo.

Truthfully it's really hard to remember Titan AE exists, even if you've seen it.

Even with the story being nonsense, it was still a decent sci-fi film. It just had no right being called Final Fantasy.

Disney just vastly overspent on production and especially promotion of Treasure Planet, so it needed to be a smash hit to break even, and it was merely average.

>movie based on a series of games famous for colorful, outlandish fantasy worlds with larger-than-life characters and plots

>it's drab sci-fi drama with boring characters

Gee, what could possibly go wrong? although the ending with the soaring bird still looks fucking amazing 15 years later

>ctrl+f
>No mention of "a troll in central park"

Wasn't that one of the biggest bombs in cinema history?

Delgo

Yeah, they're a long way from things like All Dogs Go To Heaven, which really did deserve to flop (one of those "I'm gonna build a movie around this one scene, and then forget about that during rewrite but refuse to let that one scene be entirely removed" movies where the plot is entirely the problem because it doesn't focus on any thing properly).

I suddenly realised I'd conflated it with Treasure Planet when I saw that picture.

No, that's still Water World (Treasure Island is also up there - it killed the entire concept of a pirate movie for a decade and took two seperate production companies down in the process)

I find it funny when movies like BvS or even the new ghostbusters are refered to as flops after making back their own budgets and a bit more, when catastrophes like this one exist.

I still believe to this day that most of the movie's failure is due to Dreamworks absolute incapacity to make a decent trailer.
I mean, really. Give a look at it. They throw out easily 70% out of the plot to a point you don't even need to go and watch it.

youtube.com/watch?v=JcOfJwN0bdY

I tried to like it but there was no character development and it just overall wasn't as cool as the creators wanted it to be.

>my secret intentions are revealed through the choice of the image I posted

It did that poorly? I remember loving that movie as a kid.

Black Cauldron was bland and annoyng as fuck, it hurts me every frame wasted in a movie so boring

Say... meow.

I didn't even really like it when I was a kid.

The Iron Giant was a box office failure. Made only 30% of its budget back.
boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=irongiant.htm

What? That's a great movie!

Water World is a pretty classic example. (Though it did manage to generate some profit thanks to home video sales)

Wasn't The Great Mouse Detective considered a flop even though it did relatively good business? I remember Disney getting really close to bankruptcy/irrelevancy in the animation department right before they hit the renaissance.

Yes they did, all the Waner original animated movies era except space jam and iron giant flopped


>Quest to camelot
>Princess and the swan
>Cats don't dance
>The king and i

The first two tried to copy the disney princess routine step by step, (same-face-girl+same-fame-guy+pop-culture-mascot-voiced-by-comedian) which was already dated at the age with the experimental era. And when pixar came with Toy Story at same time as quest to Camelot Warner got crushed.

Cats don't dance was supposed to resurrect Merrie Melodies, but they focused too much in the music and not in the characters, most of the jokes where cut which made the movie bland and went straight to TV in most countries.


The king and i was a fucking mess. The animation had low budge and some fuckface forget to adjust the frames in some scenes. And the story was based on a fake description of a asian Emperor, forged by england as a excuse to invade his country.

All I know is that The Great Mouse Detective is my favorite Disney film.

I honestly went to go see Titus AE 4 times when it came out. I loved it.

Weirdly enough the companion video game was one of the best selling titles of the 80s, indeed of all time. So while the film itself lost money it made its losses back on the peripheral merchandise. Don't ask why I know this.

>I'm gonna build a movie around this one scene, and then forget about that during rewrite but refuse to let that one scene be entirely removed
What are some other examples of this

I get why fantasia floped but what happened to fantasia 2000

Jesus christ they showed fucking everything even the villain death

come the fuck on

I wasn't aware of that. Yeah that would be a factor

They released it exclusively in IMAX theaters in a time when IMAX wasn't was widely spread as it is today. The celebrity cameos also likely didn't help.