KentuckyWildcat

21 Jun 2014, 19:04

By every measure of audience satisfaction I know of, the people who are going to see the movie really like it. 93% of the audience on Rotten Tomatoes liked it with an average rating of 4.5/5, an A Cinemascore, average rating of 8.6 on IMDB, and an 8.4 user score on Metacritic.

Given that information, the failure to meet expectations certainly seems like a marketing problem of some sort. While things like that usually can't be explained by a single factor, I think I'll stick to my original theory (which was probably expressed more precisely by Eret) that the contradictory strategy of building buzz about a darker movie only to make the sillier moments the entire focus of the TV spots ended up appealing to nobody outside the already established fanbase.

Quincy Dan

22 Jun 2014, 02:21

They released it too early. They had too many other films to compete with. If they waited until July they would have had it better.

Eret

22 Jun 2014, 06:24

People coddle their children to the point of obnoxiousness and its even worse now than it was 20 years ago when the Lion King was released, now that the internet has become so prevalent and the self-righteous morality police can spread their fear mongering bull**** to the gullible masses like wildfire. Your child's head will not explode at the hint of a gay person and it will not ruin their life to see a death in film. Meanwhile I'm sure Transformers 4 will be a massive hit among fans old and young, because violence is totally ok as long as its not in an animated movie and the mommy blogs didn't tell you to get morally outraged about it.

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The biggest measure of audience satisfaction is the box office.

Cartoon Freak

22 Jun 2014, 14:26

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The biggest measure of audience satisfaction is the box office.

Um, no. If a person pays to see a movie and doesn't like it, then their ticket still goes towards the box office gross. If a lot of people go through this process, then the film will still make plenty of money at the box office.

Now, box office can be affected by audience satisfaction (particularly in regards to repeat viewings), but the former is not a good measure of the latter. It just happens to be the only one that studio executives care about.

Skywalker

22 Jun 2014, 12:36

Eret

22 Jun 2014, 06:24

People coddle their children to the point of obnoxiousness and its even worse now than it was 20 years ago when the Lion King was released, now that the internet has become so prevalent and the self-righteous morality police can spread their fear mongering bull**** to the gullible masses like wildfire. Your child's head will not explode at the hint of a gay person and it will not ruin their life to see a death in film. Meanwhile I'm sure Transformers 4 will be a massive hit among fans old and young, because violence is totally ok as long as its not in an animated movie and the mommy blogs didn't tell you to get morally outraged about it.

This feels more like an excuse then an actual reason. I am having trouble thinking of a film that has been truly effected by this the last decade. Animated or not. Considering the reception of the first film, which itself had a very "unsafe" end and plenty of violence.

The series box office trend is actually quite a bit like Kung Fu Panda, another Dreamworks property.

Pakba

22 Jun 2014, 07:06

Eret

22 Jun 2014, 06:24

People coddle their children to the point of obnoxiousness and its even worse now than it was 20 years ago when the Lion King was released, now that the internet has become so prevalent and the self-righteous morality police can spread their fear mongering bull**** to the gullible masses like wildfire. Your child's head will not explode at the hint of a gay person and it will not ruin their life to see a death in film. Meanwhile I'm sure Transformers 4 will be a massive hit among fans old and young, because violence is totally ok as long as its not in an animated movie and the mommy blogs didn't tell you to get morally outraged about it.

"How to Train Your Dragon’s Gobber the Belch is Destroying Civilization"
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/06/17/ ... ation.html

Eret

22 Jun 2014, 15:14

Skywalker

22 Jun 2014, 12:36

Eret

22 Jun 2014, 06:24

People coddle their children to the point of obnoxiousness and its even worse now than it was 20 years ago when the Lion King was released, now that the internet has become so prevalent and the self-righteous morality police can spread their fear mongering bull**** to the gullible masses like wildfire. Your child's head will not explode at the hint of a gay person and it will not ruin their life to see a death in film. Meanwhile I'm sure Transformers 4 will be a massive hit among fans old and young, because violence is totally ok as long as its not in an animated movie and the mommy blogs didn't tell you to get morally outraged about it.

This feels more like an excuse then an actual reason. I am having trouble thinking of a film that has been truly effected by this the last decade. Animated or not. Considering the reception of the first film, which itself had a very "unsafe" end and plenty of violence.

The series box office trend is actually quite a bit like Kung Fu Panda, another Dreamworks property.

Its not an excuse. You can't really think that the buzz about how dark this movie was as well as the Gobber talk didn't kill at least some of its audience. There are people in this thread saying that they heard parents say the thought movie would be too scary and didn't want to take their kids. Laika movies suffer from the same thing, especially Paranorman. And the first httyd doesn't even apply here, nobody was writing articles about how traumatic and damaging it was for our poor children weeks before it was even released. httyd had several reasons for its bad opening but morally outraged parents were not one of them like they are for the sequel. Obviously its only one of a combination of reasons the movie underperformed, and we can go back and forth on just how big of a factor it was, but I don't agree at all with you dismissing it entirely as an excuse.

Kung Fu Panda had its own reasons for being a box office disappointment, also related to marketing but not in the same way. Not every case is the same.

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love Laika films. Their problems aren't their darkness, it is that they make stop-motion films. In the last 20 years, how many stop-motion animated films have been great successes? I am pretty sure the answer is none. Nightmare is by far the most well known and most beloved, but even that film didn't break $100m.

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Giving credence to the Gobber situation implies a high level of bigotry to a large amount of parents who would have had to know about something that doesn't actually come up in the film. While on the darkness front, you again have to be thinking an uncanny amount of parents read about it and took heed.

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This film isn't dark. It isn't going to scar anyone. We are talking about the same generation of parents that took their kids to go see Batman get his backside beat up by Bane. They loved as the Hulk destroyed puny aliens and Gods. Gobber being gay does not actually come up.

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It is because of this, that the second weekend numbers are telling imo. The drop implies dissatisfaction and/or apathy.

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DreamWorks Animation's “How to Train Your Dragon 2” flew into the record books — and past concerns about the World Cup denting the global box office — with a $6.8 million opening in Brazil.

That's the second biggest animated opening ever in that country, which is playing host to soccer's biggest event. It's also three times more than the original's debut there, and 10 percent better than last summer's debut of “Despicable Me 2.” A number of distributors have steered clear of this portion of the summer during the World Cup, but it proved no problem for “Dragon 2.”

The Fox-distributed family film was in 53 foreign markets overall, and finished No. 1 in 30 of them, bringing in $43.5 million from abroad this weekend. That ups the international total for the PG-rated adventure to $77.2 million, with most of the big European markets still to come.