With “Ratatouille,” analysts fretted about whether moviegoers would go to see a movie about a rat in the kitchen. They did. With “Wall-E,” people feared the lack of dialogue would bore children. It did not.
As noted in the article, those films banked box-office business of a quarter-billion dollars. Each. Yet it seems the asshats still control the dialogue and, by extension, the purse-strings:
“We doubt younger boys will be that excited by the main character,” he wrote, adding a complaint about the lack of a female lead.
Indeed. We are also Quite Concerned that there is a 17% defect in the sass-back quotient and absolutely no fart jokes. How can you possibly even market a film like that?
Astonishingly, Disney (absolute and unchallenged kings of scarcely animated, direct to DVD cash-ins) even puts some pushback on the side of the creative out there:
“We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.”
That's the best statement I've seen come out of Disney since this comment:
We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
Walt Disney
That sentiment, however, is clearly too much to hope for.
