For the second consecutive year, a C-grade animated film has taken up residency at the bottom of Hollywood's box-office pool. And look who Battle For Terra took with it: Evan Rachel Wood, Luke Wilson, Justin Long, Brian Cox and others, from whom I think we all expected much more of a fight before they succumbed to Terra's spectacularly bad $1.1 million opening on nearly 1,200 screens. But a glance at the bigger picture reveals plenty of blame to go around -- and it goes back further than you think.
In fact, look to the perfect storm of middling animation, studio butchery and marketplace miscalculations, a vortex that has gathered formidable strength over the last few years. Crap that used to be shoveled straight to DVD has ostensibly found new theatrical life in the Pixar era, but for every sleeper like Hoodwinked or Igor, there's a Terra, a Doogal, or much much worse hijacking the multiplex -- and paying dearly for the mistake. If you dare, browse the recent history that got modern animation to this sad juncture:
1. The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)
Opening weekend gross: $3.58 million (PTA: $1,531)
Cumulative gross: $11.41 million
Voice cast: Tara Strong, Elizabeth Daily, Cathy Cavadini
Warner Bros. spun off the popular Cartoon Network franchise with little energy or support in summer 2002, counting on the brand alone to attract young fans, their parents, and the show's adult cult following. While hardly a tentpole offering, the $3.6 million opening (and the following week's 56% drop) didn't reassure anybody that the masses were ready for a full-length Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup treatment. That said, Don LaFontaine was clearly into it.
2. Doogal (2006)
Opening weekend gross: $3,605,899 (PTA: $1,555)
Cumulative gross: $7,417,319
Voice cast: Judi Dench, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, William H. Macy, Whoopi Goldberg
The Weinstein Company had its first real hit with 2005's sharp (if not especially attractive) revisionist fairy tale Hoodwinked. A sequel's on the way in 2010, but in the interim, Harvey Weinstein got messed up with Doogal, about a candy-craving dog (voiced by Daniel Tay) venturing out to save the world from the evil wizard Zeebad (Stewart). Even the all-star cast couldn't really shake the downmarket Disney aesthetic -- at least not in America. The film did far better internationally, perhaps because foreign viewers weren't rattled by the presence of multiple Oscar-winners slumming en route to video oblivion. Watch the Mexican trailer and tell me if you have a better idea:
3. Live Freaky! Die Freaky! (2006)
Opening weekend gross: $11,290 (PTA: $664)
Cumulative gross: $11,290
Voice cast: Billie Joe Armstrong, Asia Argento, Kelly Osbourne, Travis Barker
The indie distributor Wellspring imploded not long after releasing this punk-trash stop-motion retelling of the Charles Manson story. Gory, tuneless, tasteless, and generally unwatchable (Kelly Osbourne as "Sharon Hate"? Really?), the film's one-week theatrical life soon shared the fate of Manson's victims. But, you know, without the whole tragedy subtext.
4. The Ten Commandments (2007)
Opening weekend gross: $478,910 (PTA: $577)
Cumulative gross: $952,820
Voice cast: Ben Kingsley, Alfred Molina, Christian Slater, Elliott Gould
A truly inspired bit of underdeveloped Biblo-pop junk, Commandments was commissioned by the same Christian-slanting studio that released Ben Stein's intelligent-design doc Expelled and the convert-the-heathens drama End of the Spear. With each of those latter films cleaning up at the box office, Rocky Mountain Entertainment made up for this laughably shabby stab at an Old Testament fable the whole family can enjoy. If they're high. Bonus points for the casting coup enlisting Christian Slater as Moses.
5. Delgo (2008)
Opening weekend gross: $511,920 (PTA: $237)
Cumulative gross: $694,782
Voice cast: Freddie Prinze Jr., Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anne Bancroft, Burt Reynolds, Val Kilmer
What more can anyone really say about Delgo, which last December experienced history's all-time worst bow for any film opening on more than 2,000 screens? Years in the making, a week in the tanking, the story of a troubled lizard-manchild (Prinze) finding his place in a universe of poorly rendered CGI blobs failed to move (or even court) the public. What Cal Ripken's consecutive-games-played streak is to baseball, Delgo is to box-office futility. Some benchmarks are here to stay.
6. Battle For Terra (2009)
Opening weekend gross (estimated): $1.06 million (PTA: $916)
Voice cast: Luke Wilson, Justin Long, Evan Rachel Wood, Dennis Quaid, Brian Cox
It was just a matter of time before Lionsgate got into the animation game with the same half-assed genre vigor afforded so much of its live-action material. Finished in 2007, premiered as a special Tribeca Film Festival screening in 2008, and released to ambivalence (at best) last Friday, Battle For Terra benefited slightly from a decent cast and 3-D viewing options in theaters not already commandeered by Monsters vs. Aliens. Couldn't Lionsgate have just commissioned Tyler Perry in Wilson's place, put a producer credit on this and opened it to $40 million and change? At this rate, that truly is the way of the future.