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- Anime-ting the Box Office
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Anime-ting the Box Office
Just about a month ago, I wrote about the surprising box office success of Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, an animated Sony film that despite being available to watch on Netflix had also done big numbers in theaters.
Vulture has a good piece about yet another animated film bucking the summer trends at the box office:
It’s been a lackluster summer at the box office, but last weekend proved a massive one for anime in theaters: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Infinity Castle topped the charts with a $70 million opening, shattering several box-office records along the way.
Vulture does a better job than Variety in exploring the reasons Infinity Castle turned out theatergoers. As I wrote previously about Variety:
…the Variety piece annoys me primarily because of its framing of this as a “unicorn event” that Netflix discovered organically. Why golly-gee, these Netflix wizards just happened to stumble upon some unique dark alchemy that convinced audiences to show up for a movie[.]
As I often say about the entertainment press, I find them to be much too solicitous towards tech, the implicit premise always being that there’s a deep, difficult to understand tech reason for their decision-making. Vulture rightly hypothesizes Infinity Castle’s success was for very standard entertainment business reasons: because it has mainstream, blockbuster appeal and that its creators are adept at constructing storytelling that works in feature and episodic format. However, to me its most crucial success is located here:
Since its release, the show has divided its domestic availability among four major streaming services — Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, and Funimation (later acquired by Crunchyroll) — and the highest-profile linear home for anime, Adult Swim’s Toonami block.
It would have been very easy to allow Demon Slayer and all of its IP to live in the walled garden of one of the streaming services. That’s what the modern entertainment landscape would lead you to do.
Imagine instead a world where the spokes of entertainment worked holistically: a young viewer of Demon Slayer watches the show at home on one of the streaming services where it plays, then goes to their local theater to see the new theatrical installment during its 90 day theatrical window, in front of which a curated 10 minutes of relevant previews plays, exciting this DS fan for future movie experiences on the big screen. If only!
Riding the Vomit Comet
I’ve been writing a lot of criticism of The Hollywood Reporter lately, so I am beyond pleased to fully recommend its recent oral history of the 1995 Ron Howard film Apollo 13.
To this day the film has some of the best onscreen depictions of space, and that is in large part due to how they shot the weightless scenes in the film:
To re-create the weightlessness of space, Howard experimented using wires, but with CGI in its infancy, it was hard to digitally remove them and miserable for the actors. During a chance encounter with Steven Spielberg, they learn of the “Vomit Comet,” a KC-135 training plane that simulates weightlessness by flying up to 40,000 feet, then nose diving.
RON HOWARD We started off thinking we were only going to do five or six days, but it was so effective that I convinced the studio to let us build not just the command module, but also the LIM and the tunnel so that we could shoot every master shot for the movie on the KC-135.
[TOM] HANKS The time shooting on it could not have been replicated in any other place at that time, cinema-wise. No wires, no tilted cameras, nothing would have produced the true look of zero gravity weightlessness [other] than going up doing those parabola over the Gulf of Mexico. Even today, no one would try to do that because it would all be done with CGI and newer techniques that take away all of the manpower and danger and time-consuming qualities of actually building a set, sticking it in a plane and going around flying up and down.
There really is a visceral, physical quality to these shots and scenes that I think most CGI space scenes often struggle to match thirty years later.
Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)
Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:
Fubo launches a “skinny” TV sports bundle. (link)
A filmmaking collective helps communities digitize their analog memories. (link)
The new horror style for Him. (link)