Dreamworks and Aardman Partnership Gets Flushed Away

by Christopher Campbell Jan 31st 2007 // 12:31PM

Filed under: Animation, Comedy, Shorts, Family Films, Dreamworks

Everyone knew it was coming. Following the disappointing box office of Flushed Away, there was speculation that it would happen. And now it is certain: Dreamworks has cut Aardman Animation loose. Sadly, the studio is now also citing the weak performance of the Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as an added reason for the end of the partnership. Aside from winning prestigious awards, that film made more than $192 million worldwide (actually, only $20 million more than Flushed Away). I guess when you're used to Shrek 2-size figures ($920 million), though, a lot of numbers look small.

I'm not too worried about Aardman. They were doing amazing work before the Dreamworks deal, and they'll do amazing work after. The animation studio still has a thing going with CBS, which is sitting on seven episodes of a Creature Comforts series, which I think is based on Nick Park's Oscar-winning short. However, there may not be any features from Aardman for awhile. I was very upset to learn that Crood Awakening, which was co-written by John Cleese and was to be the next Aardman feature, is being left behind at Dreamworks, where it will presumably be shelved for good. I'm sure that Dreamworks is hoping the Shrek movies will never lose their steam, but I just can't believe that there's much more to do with those characters.

1 Comments

Tags: aardman animation, AardmanAnimation, chicken run, ChickenRun, cinematical, creature comforts, CreatureComforts, film, flushed away, FlushedAway, john cleese, JohnCleese, movies, nick park, NickPark, peter lord, PeterLord, wallace and gromit, WallaceAndGromit

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

2-03-2007 @ 4:27AM

David Bradbury said...

Curiously, there's an old news story in the IMDB Were-Rabbit coverage about predicted box-office for that film just before release. Investors were advised to *buy* Dreamworks stock on the basis that the film would do up to $16M in its opening weekend in the US, and a total of $175M in all markets over the length of its cinema run. As noted above, it actually performed at or above these expectations, except in one important way: the US box ofice total was predicted to be $65M, but ended up at only $56m. My guess is that in the Dreamworks/Aardman deal, Dreamworks got most of the American income, Aardman most of the European. That would be a pretty strong incentive for Dreamworks to mess around with "Flushed Away" to make it appeal more to the home market.

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