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In his Word of Mouth column, Times Hollywood reporter John Horn discusses the continuing trend of 3-D films. As "Clash of the Titans" prepares to debut, the glut of films and scarcity of screens, along with the quality of films converted from 2-D to 3-D, may soon come into question among filmgoers. Here's an excerpt:
It worked for classic children's literature. The signs look equally promising for Greek mythology.
Hollywood's stereoscopic crusade has led several studios to rush to retrofit two-dimensional movies into 3-D releases. While some smaller companies dabbled in the conversion strategy before with mixed results -- such as 2007's "Battle for Terra" -- so far only two studios have finished rebooting movies originally conceived and shot as 2-D titles.
The first, Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," is a massive hit, with a domestic gross approaching $300 million. A whopping third or so of the Lewis Carroll adaptation's revenue is attributable to the higher ticket prices charged by theaters with 3-D screens, in which tickets can cost an extra $2 to $4 more. Next up: Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures' remake of "Clash of the Titans," which is poised to have the best Easter opening ever (the holiday record of $40.2 million was set by 2006's "Scary Movie 4"), with weekend sales projected to be more than $60 million, with $70 million not entirely out of reach. It opens in wide release Thursday night with more screens added Friday.
The PG-13 rated mythology movie, starring Sam Worthington as Perseus, Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, is generating strong interest from men in their 20s and 30s, according to audience tracking surveys. Among the two other new wide releases, younger girls will likely head for Miley Cyrus'"The Last Song," while African Americans, particularly black women, are leaning toward Tyler Perry's sequel "Why Did I Get Married Too?"
Given the enormous returns generated by the 3-D "Avatar" -- a worldwide haul nearing $2.7 billion, with about 80% of its $740.7 million domestic take coming from theaters with 3-D screens -- Hollywood's growing affection for the format is hardly surprising, especially as ancillary revenue from DVDs plummet. Among movies previously envisioned as 2-D productions, Sony is planning a 3-D reworking of its 2011 vampire story "Priest," while Warners has similar stereoscopic plans for the last two "Harry Potter" films, 2011's "Sucker Punch" and "Green Lantern."
But the tactic does have its doubters, including "Avatar's" own James Cameron. "It's typical of Hollywood getting it wrong," he told MTV. "Now it's being crammed down from above and now people are being told to make movies in 3-D, when it should have been the other way around."
The March 26 release of "How to Train Your Dragon" is getting strong early reviews (like the one in Entertainment Weekly and another in Variety), and Los Angeles Times film reporter John Horn has an interesting look at the making of the film. This is a longer version of his cover story in this coming Sunday's Calendar section.
Animated movies can take forever to make — three or four years is well within the ordinary. “How To Train Your Dragon,” which tells the story of a scrawny kid destined to prove his hecklers wrong through an unusual relationship with a dragon, moved at a radically different pace: the two filmmakers behind March 26’s 3-D adventure had just 12 months to make their film, inheriting a project needing a top-to-bottom overhaul.
Pressed for time, writer-directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (the team behind 2002’s “Lilo & Stitch”) tried to avoid some of the pitfalls — such as polishing a joke to within an inch of its life — that an unhurried production schedule often engenders. “It’s a model that allows for too much indecision,” DeBlois says of the often endless stops and starts that are part of the timetable for most animated movies. “You can get into a situation where the only thing that 30 people in a room can agree on is a cliché.”
While reviewers have yet to weigh in on the artistic merits of the DreamWorks Animation production, “How to Train Your Dragon” feels unlike some of the studio’s previous animated movies, particularly a few of its star-driven movies (Jerry Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie,” Will Smith’s “Shark Tale,” Brad Pitt’s “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas”) that were critically battered for having more concept and celebrity than originality and heart. “How to Train Your Dragon,” in other words, plays like a director’s movie, not a committee’s.
“Chris and Dean,” says Bill Damaschke, co-president of production for DreamWorks animation, “are part of an overall shift in what we’re trying to do.”
Loosely based on Cressida Cowell’s children’s book, the approximately $165-million “Dragon” is the first release in a potentially landmark year for the animation studio, which will introduce two other features before 2010 is over: May 21’s “Shrek Forever After” and Nov. 5’s “Megamind.” It’s the first time Jeffrey Katzenberg’s studio has released three movies in a year (having only one film, “Monsters vs. Aliens,” in 2009), as DreamWorks increases its output to five movies every two years.
Extensive story and character renovations and director replacements are scarcely unique to animated movies at DreamWorks. Brad Bird was not the original director of Pixar’s “Ratatouille” (he took over from Jan Pinkava), John Lasseter replaced Ash Brannon on Pixar’s “Toy Story 2,” Glen Keane left Disney’s upcoming “Tangled” and was replaced by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, and Sanders was the original director of Disney’s “American Dog,” the movie that became Howard and Chris Williams’ “Bolt.”
But rarely has the clock been ticking as fast as it was on “How to Train Your Dragon.”
Walt Disney’s creative vision was that there is a child inside everyone no matter his or her age. Particularly in its modern classic animated titles, the studio he founded packed films with youthful protagonists: Simba in “The Lion King,” Ariel in “The Little Mermaid,” Jasmine in “Aladdin” to name but a few. Under Katzenberg, the 16-year-old DreamWorks (whose animation division went public in 2004) turned Disney’s notion on its head, populating its animated movies with adults (Shrek being the prime example) who might appeal to children.
Cowell’s novel about Vikings and their complicated relationship with dragons, however, is filled with pre-pubescent kids, a perfect book for second-graders. In the studio’s efforts to remain true to her reluctant hero story, original director Peter Hastings (who made “The Country Bears” and has TV credits on “Pinky and the Brain” and “Animaniacs”) assembled a movie that in DreamWorks’ view played more to the “SpongeBob SquarePants” crowd than followers of “Harry Potter.”
In an era when more and more families attend sometimes intense movies together — “Avatar,” “Spider-Man” — the initial version of “How to Train Your Dragon” felt too young to the studio: the kind of movie for which parents drop off their kids but do not attend themselves.
“It was a little small and personal story, and I think that’s the way Cressida wrote it,” says Bonnie Arnold (“Toy Story,” “Over the Hedge”), the film’s producer. As the studio saw it, that faithfulness became a perceived liability: If “Dragon” didn’t have older characters and more ambitious action scenes, its audience would become limited and it would suffer at the box office. “It was not a universal story that everyone would love,” Damaschke says.
Sanders, having left Disney after 2006’s Pixar deal (which put his “American Dog” under new bosses), already was at DreamWorks and had spent a year directing the prehistoric story “The Croods.” Damaschke, thought Sanders would be a good choice to replace Hastings (whose talent agency did not return a call seeking comment). “I didn’t know anything specific about the story,” Sanders says. “I just had a good feeling about it.” He set aside “The Croods,” which will now come out a year later than originally scheduled, in March 2012.
It was October 2008, and although “How to Train Your Dragon” previously had been moved from November 2009 to March 2010 (largely to steer clear of “Avatar”), Sanders didn’t have a minute to lose; DreamWorks, confident it made good sense to release three movies this year, worried that if the film wasn’t ready by March it would slip all the way to 2011. Even when every scene in an animated movie is written, storyboarded and animated, it takes months more to finish the film’s lighting, scoring and sound mixing, meaning that Sanders had just a year to remake it.
One of Sanders’ first calls was to DeBlois, his “Lilo & Stitch” collaborator, who was in Seattle, trying to kick-start several live-action movies that he would write and direct. “Chris said, ‘What are you doing right now?’” DeBlois recalls. “I bought a plane ticket. And we started that week.”
In tracking the book, the original version of the film not only featured younger characters (led by a far-from-fearless boy named Hiccup) but also followed very different rules of engagement between the 8th century occupants of the Island of Berk and the neighboring fire-breathing reptiles.
The novel and the early movie version had the North Sea residents and the dragons intermingling; in place of warfare was cooperation. “We felt there wasn’t enough peril,” DeBlois says. In Hastings’ movie, the young children collect dragon eggs and raise them to do tricks. In Sanders and DeBlois’ version, Berk is under attack from the dragons, who steal the remote village’s livestock and burn its homes.
“We had to decide that they were enemies. It’s a deadly relationship. And Hiccup would be the first one to cross that line,” Sanders says. While Sanders and DeBlois retained many of the original movie version’s characters and the actors who played them, they made substantive changes to their ages and size. Hiccup (voiced by “Tropic Thunder’s” Jay Baruchel) and his romantic interest, Astrid (“Ugly Betty’s” America Ferrera), matured from about 10 years old to nearly 17.
Also, the movie was first set in a land so bleak and so cold no one would want to pick as a vacation destination. “Jeffrey said, ‘This has to be a place you want to go visit,’” Arnold says.
The story’s central dragon, Toothless, also grew exponentially, from a small and cuddly pet into a formidable, flyable beast. (Rather than dispatch the original incarnations to the animation scrap heap, Sanders and DeBlois instead gave the three characters as first animated a couple of cameos. Toothless as he was initially envisioned is now a small dragon who appears early in the film, trying to steal food from the new Toothless, only to be sent away with a blast of fire.
The first Hiccup and Astrid are now small children in a woman’s arms who turn up late in the film as Toothless leaves in a boat.) At the same time, the relationship between Hiccup and his disappointed warrior father, Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler) grew more central to the plot.
(For viewers who are reminded of James Cameron's Pandora during some of the sequences: Sanders and DeBlois says that even though the films were made totally independent of each other they were struck by how similar some of the how-to-train-your-banshee sequences in “Avatar” were to a number of dragon-flying scenes in “How to Train Your Dragon.” “Isn’t that funny?” Sanders says.)
Required to make decisions and never second-guess them (“Everyone knew that time was running out,” Sanders says), the filmmakers put together a large poster laying out storytelling themes that could not be violated as they rewrote and reshot the film: “At its core, this is a story about a son and his father.” “A story where the son’s weakness becomes his greatest strength.” “A story where the littlest guy will defeat the biggest thing the Vikings have ever seen.”
The filmmakers made any number of small changes — patterning the dragons’ flying on fighter planes, bringing in cinematographer Roger Deakins (impressed by his work on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and other films) as a consultant to give the film more cinematic lighting — as they raced toward their release date.
“You’re making a leap of faith when you have so little time,” producer Arnold says. “We let them run with it.”
Los Angeles Times reporter John Horn is one of the top journalists covering Hollywood and he recently sat down with five directors --- James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Quentin Tarantino, Lee Daniels and Jason Reitman -- and conducted a fascinating round table discussion. You can find video snippets of it at our sister blog 24 Frames -- but here are two intriguing excerpts from "Avatar" writer and director Cameron, who may be the king of the world (again) on Oscar night.
Cameron on a beloved scene that just didn't make the cut...
It was an epiphanal scene for me when I was writing the script, and when I wrote it, I actually kind of welled up myself. It’s a scene at the end where the warrior that Jake has had to prove himself to, Tsu’tey, the guy that’s ... keeping him out of the clan and the whole Na’vi experience, is dying after the battle ... Jake goes to him and he hands him the baton of leadership and says, “You have to lead the people,” as he’s dying. Very, very powerful, emotional scene and again, the rhythm — it just messed with the rhythm of the ending. It just felt like there was one dramatic beat too many...
It had to come out completely, and that was the one scene that we finished all the way through the [special effects] Weta process because nobody could imagine the scene not being in the movie. Nobody. All the effects people came to me and said, “I can’t believe you’re cutting Tsu’tey’s death.” They were all invested in the scene. So, I actually had it out and I put it back in ... Then it got right down to the end where the final decision had to be made and I said, "No, it’s coming out."
Cameron on the fact that "Avatar" is a truly personal film...
It’s hard to visualize “Avatar” maybe from the outside as a personal film, but to me in a funny way from my perspective, it’s my most personal film because it so accurately reflects my childhood — as a kid who was both an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy and comic books and constantly conjuring all these images in my head before there were VCRs and I could just watch any movie any time I wanted ...
There was very little imagery out there at the time. You had to make it up yourself, and as an artist I was always drawing all these things, so all the stuff in “Avatar” was stuff I had been drawing for years as a teenager ... And then as a scuba diver sort of discovering the endless bounty of nature’s imagination underwater, which is really, ultimately, almost unfathomable. So “Avatar” is all of that, all sort of distilled down into one movie. The story was written 15 years ago, and certainly there was a strong environmental consciousness then ... but it’s obviously on our minds a lot more now as this sense of a coming day of reckoning ... that we really have to deal with this.
ILLUSTRATION : Top, Cameron goes native, by Kevin Lingenfelser / For Hero Complex. Bottom, Neytiri of "Avatar" receiving an Oscar, Alex Gross / For The Times
