re: Biggest movie flops this year

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Hell no. Disney is out of the Princess business. They are avoiding the term Princess and Queen in their movies - especially those primarily targeted at males - as much as possible.

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Ummm, no they haven't; they've actually gone back to the princess formula after taking a break from it for 10 years. 3 out of their last 4 films have involved princesses as main character, and looking at Wikipedia, their next one has the Queen's sister (who I'm guessing will be called a princess) as the main character.

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Ummm, no they haven't; they've actually gone back to the princess formula after taking a break from it for 10 years. 3 out of their last 4 films have involved princesses as main character, and looking at Wikipedia, their next one has the Queen's sister (who I'm guessing will be called a princess) as the main character.

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I should have clarified. They aren't giving them Princessy names. It's why Tangled was Tangled instead of Rapunzel. It's why Brave became Brave instead of The Bear and The Bow (granted that was a vague, uninteresting title). Not sure what the other film you are referring to is. But Brave was a Pixar film anyways - yeah yeah I know the House of Mouse owns them but they still do their own thing creatively.

They aren't marketing these movies as princess love stories anymore a la TLM and BATB.

If you are referring to Frozen, then that's not going to be a princess tale at all. Their movie plot is deviating heavily from the book story. They are dropping the whole damsel in distress angle from the past and going with tougher feminine characters. That's following a larger trend in the television/film industry.

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I should have clarified. They aren't giving them Princessy names. It's why Tangled was Tangled instead of Rapunzel. It's why Brave became Brave instead of The Bear and The Bow (granted that was a vague, uninteresting title). Not sure what the other film you are referring to is. But Brave was a Pixar film anyways - yeah yeah I know the House of Mouse owns them but they still do their own thing creatively.

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Yeah, you're right as far as titles are concerned, which is absolutely retarded as far as I'm concerned.

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If you are referring to Frozen, then that's not going to be a princess tale at all. Their movie plot is deviating heavily from the book story. They are dropping the whole damsel in distress angle from the past and going with tougher feminine characters. That's following a larger trend in the television/film industry.

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Well the last few princesses haven't exactly been damsels in distress like some of the other Disney princesses have been. I think they're distancing themselves with that aspect over just distancing themselves from princesses.

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Yeah, you're right as far as titles are concerned, which is absolutely retarded as far as I'm concerned.

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Not it's not. Do you think 7 year old boys want to see The Princess and The Frog or a movie called Brave? It's all about marketing. Disney is the best in the business at this. Granted, they don't have a perfect track record (Dinosaur, Mars needs Moms, John Carter say hello), but they have easily the best marketing department in the film industry.

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Well the last few princesses haven't exactly been damsels in distress like some of the other Disney princesses have been. I think they're distancing themselves with that aspect over just distancing themselves from princesses.

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Well when you think about it, Belle was arguably the best Disney "princess" out there and she wasn't a princess at all. Neither was Cinderella - granted she sort of became one, but gold diggers gonna gold dig.

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Not it's not. Do you think 7 year old boys want to see The Princess and The Frog or a movie called Brave? It's all about marketing. Disney is the best in the business at this. Granted, they don't have a perfect track record (Dinosaur, Mars needs Moms, John Carter say hello), but they have easily the best marketing department in the film industry.

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No, Disney's marketing department shite the bed this year. Brave was a good $200 mil under expectations; no reason that film shouldn't have been renamed from "The Bear and the Bow". Removing "of Mars" from John Carter was retarded; seriously, if I had never heard of John Carter, how was I supposed to know what the movie was about? Disney released a good product this year, but aside from anything involving Marvel, they have gone below expectations as far as Box Office is concerned.

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Well when you think about it, Belle was arguably the best Disney "princess" out there and she wasn't a princess at all. Neither was Cinderella - granted she sort of became one, but gold diggers gonna gold dig.

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They became one which is all that is required.

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You're playing extremely fast and loose with the term princess if you consider Vanellope von Schweetz a princess. She was a "princess" for all of 10 seconds in the movie.

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Meets the definition still, and was initially before King Candy took over. She still fits the bill regardless.

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But back to my earlier point, there was absolutely no way that Disney was going to call their big spring action sci-fi flick "The Princess of Anything" when their target audience for that genre is males that don't give a shite about any princess story. Besides, the "princess" of that story was far from the main character. Lily Collins was at best the 3 leading character behind John and whatever the hell his green companion's name was.

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I wasn't proposing they call it that. Why not call it "John Carter of Mars"? John Carter doesn't tell anyone anything for people not familiar with the character. When they see the poster, they're simply confused and don't give a damn. When you add the "Of Mars" to it, then the audience is a little more caught up on what this film is supposed to be about. Its about someone with a very ordinary name and how he somehow gets to Mars and fights beasts there. That was a massive, massive blunder by their marketers, and likely led to the film being a massive flop.

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Meets the definition still, and was initially before King Candy took over. She still fits the bill regardless.

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Some major league crawfishing you have going on there guy.

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I wasn't proposing they call it that. Why not call it "John Carter of Mars"? John Carter doesn't tell anyone anything for people not familiar with the character. When they see the poster, they're simply confused and don't give a damn. When you add the "Of Mars" to it, then the audience is a little more caught up on what this film is supposed to be about. Its about someone with a very ordinary name and how he somehow gets to Mars and fights beasts there. That was a massive, massive blunder by their marketers, and likely led to the film being a massive flop.

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The title was a very minor issue. Their bad ads were the problem. The trailers and ads did a piss poor job of representing the movie itself. The shitty Peter Gabriel song, overly featuring Lily Collins, and not hyping it up as the "original" outer space sci-fi story really hurt it.

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As I said, that's more due to the fact that the film was giving us something that we've never seen more so than good marketing. There was nothing particularly impressive about the marketing for the film, since the film basically does that itself.

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They placed ads everywhere. They plastered primetime television for 2 weeks out, they hit up their parks, they ran it on all of their channels, and they added its trailer for every movie they could. They did numerous tie-ins as well. No one predicted this movie would make this amount of money. Most predictions a couple of months out had it doing about $125 opening weekend and $400 million domestically. It shite on those numbers. Why? MARKETING.

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They were expecting near $700, not $500. Up scored of $800, so I don't see why their expectations were that high for it to meet it.

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I've seen nothing that suggested Disney was expecting that amount or that they were disappointed with their take. UP needed more from the BO because it didn't have the M&L potential of Brave.

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The market research was that "The Princess and the Frog did poorly, so they thought that the public was too stupid to read beyond one word. And the film had really nothing to do with being Brave, at least any more than any other Pixar film. It would have been an equally appropriate name for Wall-e as it was for this film.

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You are taking a very naive and narrow viewpoint on this. TPATF led to the name change for Rapunzel, not really for TBATB to Brave. Brave was a quicker and easier to remember title. Look at all of Pixar's other titles: Toy Story, Cars, Wall-E, Up, Finding Nemo, etc. Short and right to the point. Easier to market and gives more of a sense of adventure.

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They're basically the same damn thing. They massively dropped the ball and fricked up the box office royally. It was an incredibly stupid mistake since no one knew what the hell the film was about.

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No they aren't. Advertising =/= Marketing. What exactly did you major in at Ole Miss to not know the difference? I'll make it easier for you: Advertising = Trailer. Marketing = where you put the trailer. They trailer placements were just fine. They promoted the movie enough. It was the content that was the problem, not the placement. Savvy?

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No, it was a huge issue, since no one knew what the frick the film was about. No one knew what he was doing, where he was, who he was, or why he was there. Adding the "Of Mars" would have answered or implied some of these questions. Wreck-It Ralph makes it clear in a single sentence on the answers to all these questions above. If you can't answer those questions on a poster (unless its supposed to be a mystery of course which makes the audience intrigued on what exactly is going on), then you've failed.

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No it wasn't. Hell either you or another poster said that movies with the title Mars in it don't do as well. Hell when some people see Mars in the title, they get turned off by it. They wanted to emphasize the character John Carter in their title as it was HIS story they were telling. You don't call it Thor of Asgard or Iron Man of Malibu. I know you are going to say "YEAH BUT NO ONE KNOWS WHO HE IS RUBBARUBBARUBBARUBBA". That's why they should have emphasized that he and his story were the original space/sci-fi story. This story literally did influence the stories of Star Wars, Avatar, and scores of old school sci-fi/space-related movies. They didn't wise up until the last week of advertising and by then they had already fricked up their first and second impressions. Seriously whoever thought putting a faggy arse Peter Gabriel song in the trailer for a sci-fi adventure film deserves to be fired, only to be hired again a week later and fired once more. What next? Celine Dion's Titanic song for the The Avengers 2 trailer?

This film has apparently made $117 (not $117K -- $117, period) at the box office so far:

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If Disney is telling you tangled isn't a princess movie they are full of shite. I've seen this movie roughly 4 trillion times. I assure you its a princess movie.