Unless a few hundred thousand of you out there are deliberately waiting until today to go see Lucasfilm’s “Strange Magic” in theaters, the first movie of Disney’s 2015 slate will go down as a flop. Despite opening in more than 3,000 theaters, it’s expected to pull in less than $5 million at the box office this weekend. Just barely hanging in the top 10 for the weekend.
This list of reasons for the poor performance are long, it came out of nowhere at the end of last year, it received generally bad reviews, had a very visually similar look to last year’s EPIC, had a very similar plot to last year’s EPIC, it never really communicated the story that would entice kids enough to demand to their parents they see the film, it has a weird name that tells you nothing about the story. We actually gave it a mixed review here on the blog, but thought it worth seeing, especially if you have young ones who don’t mind a few dark moments.
Update 1/26/15: In the end “Strange Magic” ended up with $5.5 million. Current thoughts are that showing it in theaters was part of the deal that Disney struck to buy Star Wars as part of Lucasfilm. Since early screenings were poor, Disney passed it to Touchstone Pictures and limited the marketing budget to avoid losing even more money. The result, Strange Magic opened in 7th place, with possibly the worst pre-screen average for any animated feature debut.
Add the reason you didn’t go in the comments:
never heard of it or saw any previews for it
We didn’t go for the two reasons: (1) we hardly heard anything of it; (2) when we did hear of it, it looked and sounded stupid.
Any animated film released in January after the holidays just screams “We have no confidence in this film. Just fulfilling a promise to release it.” I took the hint. It looked as boring as Epic. Big names are not enough.
Epic had its own little cozy charm. Skimmed the surface of Pixar/Disney’s ocean. Nice messages, good animation, story only lagged in a few spots. Better than Turbo, about as good as Rio 1&2, but a lot less noisy.
I saw little promo for Strange Magic. I thought it weird that what little I saw kept touting “George Lucas!” over storyline or characters. Tucked it away for DVD release.
Looks like my first impressions were spot on.
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