The myth of "Pixar's first flop" is, or was, practically the El Dorado (no pun intended) obsessively sought after for a decade by half the posters on the TAG Blog, because of their burning desire to have John Lasseter stumble so badly that heads roll, Disney tears their hair and rues the day they ever paid out all that money for Pixar, and they replace mean ol' John with that nice, easygoing Jeffrey Katzenberg, who's so much better a boss to work for.Ben wrote:Well, to be fair, the headline is sensationalist but they do clarify it as a "failure" rather than a bomb in the story itself. And, being honest, that's what this is. At any rate, it is not a "hit film".
And that was back when even the latter prospect seemed even remotely likely.
Between disgruntled animators, and frustrated analysts waiting for The Big Fall that was supposed to happen after Nemo, their Fox News desire to see it happen at all costs has become a running joke, even though we already seem to have had "Pixar's first flop" three times since then: An audience flop with Cars 2, a critical flop with Brave, and a financial flop with TGD, but they weren't really...."flop" flops. The first two made a profit, and the third either has some audiences liking it and others forgiving it for being the bastard child of a difficult birth. Unlike Treasure Planet and Princess & Frog, we didn't even "punish" it for not getting to #1 and beating Hunger Games and 007.
Think it goes back to the old John Carter argument of what is a Flop, and what is a Box-Office Disappointment--The Disappointment can have any excuse for underperforming, like a bad release date or competition, while the Flop was a misconceived disaster in the making that got what it should have seen coming if it had a moment of sanity.
For example, Winnie the Pooh '11 was a "disappointment" for being unfairly put up against Harry Potter, while Lone Ranger (and Tomorrowland) were "flops" for being just plain old nuts.
TGD's not a good film--and given Jim Hill's description of the Bob Peterson version, it's hard to say whether what we got was the lesser of two evils--but it's forgivable, while a "flop" is unforgivable.
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--but even if it suffered because press analysts had "executed" the movie for flopping for their own imagined reasons ("2D is dead!" "It must have been because she was black!"), the appeal of the movie was way too weak to bring audiences back on word of mouth like Frozen and Ralph did.
