The Sky Didn’t Fall After All
Poor Chicken Little had so much riding on its tiny shoulders going into its opening weekend. Analysts had decided that the film was going to make or break the ongoing Disney/Pixar negotiations. If it was a success, Disney could tell Pixar to go smoke its nose; if it was a failure, Disney would have to make Pixar’s bed for a year.
Others speculated that “the very future of Disney’s legendary animation division” was at stake.
Then came two early, negative reviews: one in Variety; the other in Entertainment Weekly. By Thursday afternoon there was a rumor that Mark Dindal, the director, had actually fled the country ahead of the film’s imminent failure. And things were supposedly so bad at Walt Disney Feature Animation that Disney’s greatest hope for its digital future, Rapunzel Unbraided, was unravelling.
Disney’s PR department should be congratulated on a job well done. By Friday, they had lowered expectations to the point that if more than 27 people bought tickets this past weekend, the movie would look like a stupendous success. So when the film actually managed to pull in $40,049,778.00 (though perhaps they just managed to get those 27 people to pay $1,483,325.12 per ticket), Disney was able to point to the box office numbers as a validation of their boneheaded decision to stop producing hand-drawn animation.
It’s brilliant. Tell the market that the sky is falling. Then, when it doesn’t actually happen, you can act like a hero who somehow managed to save the world from a disaster that was never going to happen in the first place.
