Is the Mouse afraid of the Lion?

  • Greg sent me this link with his usual brief sub­ject line: Blog­gable. He’s right, it is.

    Dis­ney has decided not to fund the third Nar­nia movie. They cite the low returns of ‘Prince Caspian.’ But that last Nar­nia movie made $419 mil­lion world­wide, (com­pared with the $249 mil­lion gross for a non-Christian fan­tasy movie like ‘Eragon’), and Hol­ly­wood Reporter says it’s unusual for a stu­dio to pull out of a series. So is Dis­ney afraid of the unabashedly Chris­t­ian mes­sages in the Nar­nia Chronicles?

    I thought it might be, but when I looked into it a lit­tle, I guess the answer is: not necessarily …

    Because it’s not so much that ‘Caspian’ made as what it didn’t make. It didn’t make back any­where near the $745 mil­lion of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ (‘LW&W’ just to save key­strokes). And both films cost about the same amount to make — $200 mil­lion and $180 mil­lion, respectively.

    So Dis­ney looks at the $326 mil­lion drop-off in profit between Nar­nia I & II and con­cludes that the fran­chise inter­est is dry­ing up. I don’t agree, but I can for­give them for think­ing this way. I went off to Box Office Mojo and tot­ted up num­bers from the five Harry Pot­ter movies and can see how the stu­dio number-crunchers might see a prob­lem. Here’s how the per­cent­age of prof­its stack up for the two franchises:

    Nar­nia:

    • LW&W:  313.89%
    • Prince Caspian: 109.50%

    Pot­ter:

    • Harry Pot­ter 1    680.80%
    • Harry pot­ter 2    778.00%
    • Harry pot­ter 3    511.54%
    • Harry pot­ter 4    497.33%
    • Harry pot­ter 5    525.33%

    So really, you could make a case that the num­bers are telling you it’s time to get while the get­ting is good. We could cer­tainly all talk pas­sion­ately about the need to look past things like mere prof­its. On the other hand, until we scrape together $200 mil­lion of our own, we prob­a­bly won’t be mak­ing movies.
    That’s not to say I think that Dis­ney is right. Because I don’t think the num­bers tell the whole story in this case. I think that Nar­nia fans could’ve told the stu­dio that ‘Prince Caspian’ wouldn’t have a strong show­ing. All the Nar­nia chron­i­cles are great, but with the points that Lewis made about the effect of WWII on England’s god-fearing peo­ple, ‘Caspian’ was always going to be a long, dark jour­ney. It rewards patient and dis­cern­ing movie-goers with some incred­i­ble insight from Lewis that are well worth the wait … but are movie-goers (espe­cially young movie-goers, brought up on instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and for­mu­laic mes­sages in movies) patient and dis­cern­ing any more?

    ‘Voy­age of the Dawn Treader’ — the next in the series — seems to me that it would net bet­ter returns. I think movie-makers will find it eas­ier to han­dle the pac­ing and action of this one, and the sub­plot about awful Eustace and how he finds redemp­tion always seemed to me a pow­er­ful story.

    I kind of hope so. With every­thing going on right now, I really think a new gen­er­a­tion needs to hear what C. S. Lewis had to say.


    Related posts:

    1. Bad movies, high prices … what’s wrong with this picture?
    2. Is Hol­ly­wood “a very Chris­t­ian town?”
    3. Harry Pot­ter — yeah, why not?
    4. 300
    5. Don’t go see “The Golden Compass”

    December 26th, 2008 | Grace | 5 Comments |

5 Responses and Counting...

  • Kyra­lessa 12.26.2008

    What Dis­ney isn’t con­sid­er­ing is that the receipts will prob­a­bly be fairly con­sis­tent for the rest of the books. LW&W was always going to be the big one, of course, but peo­ple who went to see Prince Caspian have prob­a­bly read all seven, and will prob­a­bly want to see all seven.

    Their real mis­take, though, is giv­ing the direc­tors free reign to change pretty much any­thing they like. I just fin­ished read­ing Prince Caspian to my four-year-old, and though I knew the movie was rather dif­fer­ent, I didn’t grasp just how vastly dif­fer­ent until I read the book again. I can see peo­ple get­ting fed up if they plan to do *that* with all the rest of the films. What they need to do is find a cre­ative direc­tor who can make a great film *within* the con­fines of the story.

  • Grace

    I may have to re-read Prince Caspian now. That was prob­a­bly the one that was the most vague in my mem­ory. My guess of the next book that would be great as a movie is The Magician’s Nephew, just because of the won­der­ful things they could do with the Cre­ation segment.

    But you’re right. It would depend on them not leav­ing things out.

  • Mimi

    I re-read Prince Caspian last week after we saw the DVD, I had no mem­ory of the book, and when reread­ing it, I real­ized it is because it is a bridge book. Kh. Fred­er­ica wrote an arti­cle about the fact that she thinks the movie actu­ally exceeds the book, and I agree with her.

    And, I am shocked at this — I think that they’ve done such a good job with th movies and that there is a hard­core group of peo­ple who are fans and will­ing to be with them.

    Even more than HP.

  • DebD

    I’m the only one in the fam­ily who liked the PC and that is because it has been over 15 years since I last read it. OTOH, the kids and hubby and just fin­ished re-reading it and were quite disappointed.

    It is rather sad that Dis­ney has done this since its seems to me that Voy­age… is one of the best books in the series for many peo­ple (PC usu­ally being near the bottom).

    It would be inter­est­ing to com­pare the num­bers for the Nar­nia series with the Golden Com­pass. I think HP num­bers would be hard to reach for most books-to-movies.

  • Grace

    I can pro­vide some answers about how PC com­pared to Golden Com­pass (by way of http://www.boxofficemojo.com which, if I didn’t explain it, will give you the num­bers on any movie you want).

    The story is a lit­tle bit inter­est­ing. In Amer­ica, PC earned about twice as much as Com­pass — $141 mil­lion vs. $70 mil­lion gross. But in for­eign mar­kets, Golden Com­pass earned $302 mil­lion and PC $278 mil­lion. So the world­wide com­par­i­son has them rel­a­tively close: PC — $419 mil­lion; Com­pass — $372 million.

    We can all bemoan the super­fi­cial­ity of Chris­tian­ity in Amer­ica, but the fact is, it is still a preva­lent cul­tural force here, not so much in ‘post-Christian’ Europe and else­where, where audi­ences were appar­ently either igno­rant of Com­pass’ bla­tant anti-Christian mes­sage aimed at chil­dren or were okay with it.

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