Treasure Planet (2002) Ron Clements, John Musker

Production Costs: $140 million $180 million with marketing Worldwide Gross: about $109 million Subsequent Earnings: couldn’t find

This is the largest animated bomb EVAH!  Treasure Planet was the 42nd animated movie by Disney.  Planet was a movie based on the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Treasure Island.  It combined hand drawn animation with 3D computer animation much like Titan A.E.  The movie had the usual Disney trappings and it looked like the kids were gonna flock to this one.  The critical response was good, not great.  When the movie was finally released, the box office was well short of what it needed.  When you deduct half from it gross, the movie cost Disney over $125 million dollars.  Ouch.

There were a few signs that this movie would have failed.  Other sci fi animated movies failed that year (Titan A.E., Final Fantasy, Atlantis).  The movie opened next to other holiday juggernauts like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and family films like Santa Clause 2.  Another reason they might have failed is because they spent $180 million on a frackin’ kids movie!  The bomb dealt a heavy blow to Disney.  They had to fire thousands of animators, scrapped other 2D films being made, and changed the format of their future of their future films to CGI animated films.  The movie is mentioned in the same sentence as Heaven’s Gate and Cutthroat Island as one of the biggest box office disasters ever.

Is it any good?  You know, I’m not the movie’s target audience.  I didn’t care for this movie, but I don’t see any problem showing this to the little rugrats.  $180 million is WAY too much for any film and I don’t know how they ever could have made their money back on this one.

I just wanted to write a little more about this.  Many of my early reviews were when I was just starting to write so I think they are poor quality.  So when I mention I am not this movie’s target audience I am just not that into kids movies anymore.  I’ve grown up.  Now I don’t know if I could be called some kind of a snob or whatever but I just don’t get the same enjoyment out of these movies as I once did and I realize that.  Even Pixar movies (for the most part) are movies I only check out once and never see again.  They are great for what they are but they don’t have the same appeal to me as an adult.  This is where I go on my old timer “You kids don’t know how good you have it” ramble but when I was growing up you didn’t just have “kids” movies but family movies.  They were movies that didn’t have offensive material and the story was good enough for people of any age.   Most kids movies nowadays just try to be good enough so parents don’t slit their wrists in agony from how annoying they are.   But I am talking about movies like say Back to the Future where it didn’t matter if I was 8 or 80 I will still find that friggin hilarious.  Now I’m sure many of you will say that animation has always been kiddy but I guess I have also been spoiled by Japanese Animation.  I would have several Japanimation movies on my top 100 that would be classified as family movies.   That’s because these movies don’t treat kids like idiots.  Just because you make a movie that is inoffensive (no cursing, blood, nudity) doesn’t mean you have to make something insipid.  People need to realize it is okay to scare kids and to put in some adult content.  You will not traumatize them; we kids are a resilient bunch.

So with all that said, I still really have nothing new to say about the movie itself.  To me, this seems like every other Disney film of that era.  It is your stock film about a young boy trying to realize his dream being accompanied by a cast of goofy characters.   There are no thrills to the story or nothing new with the plot.  The movie does just enough to be entertaining and not have the characters be gratingly annoying.  This isn’t among the bad Disney movies.  I was able to see it and not be pissed by it but I just don’t care.  This movie will be entertaining to little kids if they enjoy anything else Disney has done.  However this is nothing spectacular or deserves your attention.  And when we are talking about movies where companies spend dump trucks of money on, this wouldn’t be your first idea.  It is also especially moronic to release this movie opposite Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.  What were they thinking?  But yeah, those are my thoughts on this whole thing so hopefully that clears things up a tad.