It looks like Phil/Travis Knight are what the wrestling business calls money marks: People who love the industry thus will pump money in without any real plan.
You spend $100m on stop motion the same way a you spend $100m on any other film: paying people for their technical and artistic skills. Stop motion animation is a very time-intensive and precise art.
Or do you not understand why people would fund $100m into a stop motion film?
Probably because the financiers view stop-motion as an art worth funding. Art shouldn't need to come with financial gains to raise funding.
So if Phil and Travis Knight wanted to realize a stop-motion artistic vision, what do you propose they should have done but “go into business”? Are you suggesting they should have actually structured the movie studio as a non-profit?
I'm not sure that's fair. Most of their reported budgets are around $60M, which is high, perhaps, but stop motion at the scale they're executing is a lot of work. And their films have consistently been critical successes -- if they've had trouble finding audiences, it's not because they're turning out mediocre schlock.
I get that, but you're carefully stepping around my point that their films are good. "Son's directorial debut," Kubo and the Two Strings, has 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and 84 ("Universal Acclaim") on Metacritic. Yeah, Travis Knight totally got his job through nepotism, but against all odds, the man is a good animator and director.
Maybe he's a lousy CEO. Maybe somebody else needs to come in and say, "Look, you people keep thinking of these films as art but the market wants Minions, so you'd better dumb this stuff down, pronto." Maybe that'd work. But I honestly think it's a shame that Laika isn't doing better.
None of their prior movies made money according to standard box office accounting, which requires a box office take of 2.5x the budget.
This is because budgets don't include advertising spending, and also the film companies actually only receive about 60-70 cents on the dollar of ticket sales.
The closest any of them came was Coraline, a 2.07x multiple. None of the rest even cleared 2x. Kubo barely even covered the actual budget.
It's like the dotcom boom era when companies were selling a $10 bag of dogfood for $7.
Movies don't only make money from the the theater. Their revenue at the theater is actually their smallest source. Back in the day it was theater < DVD sales < tv licensing.
You don't get to keep making movies if they lose money. Laikas movies have done well, even if you don't want that to be true.
Blowing it in big name Hollywood actors when all you need is a decent voice actor for 5% of the price.
Nobody is going out to see a stop motion film because Hugh Jackman or Charlize Theron is in it, but someone got convinced of that somewhere along the line.
No newspaper or chat show is going to interview an unknown voice actor, no parent is going to trust an unknown voice actor won't attach themselves to some offensive rubbish but will trust Tom Hanks.
Celebrities buy you publicity and brand in a way that is hard to replicate elsewhere.
Mirroring what the sibling comment said, studios often spend almost as much on advertising as they do production. I've often heard studios "borrowing" advertising budget to pay named actors for production.
Disney's old plan was to hire past their prime actors. Starting around the 90s when Robin Williams did well for Aladdin, they started courting celebrities who are parents and want to make movies their kids can watch. Also, voice work is considered "easy" (voice actors will fight that connotation). No odd call times, make up, wardrobe, or flying to locations and staying in a hotel (Shrek had Mike Myers record some last-minute dialog inside a limo).
The Disney Renaissance and birth of DreamWorks animated studios during the 1990s and into the early aughts showed that this thinking was backwards and wrong. Commercial and critical success was built upon hiring big name Hollywood actors to lend their voices.
And some of them were exceptionally talented, like Robin Williams or Michael Meyers. Others, like Eddie Murphy, Gilbert Gottfried, Cameron Diaz - they were hired for their voice and their name on the billing. And it worked, it still works, and major productions today don't throw $100 million at a project without stars attached. That'd be crazy.
As a counterpoint I'd argue that these movies are usually also successful in countries where they are screened in non-English. Those voice actors are usually unknown to the general audience (one could argue that they are often the associated voice for the given big name actor but that's not always the case).
At least in Germany, animated movies are rarely advertised as "featuring X" whereas in the U.S. I saw the names of the voices in advertisements.
All of the people you listed have recognizable voices with a history in comedy and they were performing comedy roles in their respective animated films.
Just picking big name actors for a cartoon won't really do much. Everybody knows Tom Cruise by his performances on screen, but people probably won't be throwing down $15 to hear him as a talking donkey like they would with Eddie Murphy.
Post processing make up some of the costs. Many of the shots in Kubo, for example, have incomplete sets and are filmed in front of green screens. These need to be composited together with a CG set and backdrop.
The caliber is completely subjective, and Fantastic Mr. Fox made 1.16x box office / budget, so total flop. I’m not sure I understand how the fact that a different film that flopped made 10 years ago by a different company has a different budget demonstrates anything at all?
Lots of good films are made for less money, and lots of bad films are made for more money. Many many movies lose money. That’s the reality of movie making, it’s risky. Many many businesses lose money, those are also risky. That’s the extent of what you’re arguing here. If you really want to understand how easy it is to spend a lot of money and lose it, all you need to do is make a movie or start your own company, and witness first hand how good ideas and business plans that seem strong at the time fail to make returns.
It’s not weird or hard to understand when big projects lose money. It’s weird when they make money.
How do you spend $100m on a stop motion film?
It looks like Phil/Travis Knight are what the wrestling business calls money marks: People who love the industry thus will pump money in without any real plan.