I’ve known Bob Osher, the President of Digital Production Division of Sony Pictures, and Amy Pascal, Chairman of Sony Pictures, since we worked together at Turner Broadcasting. Together with their great Sony Pictures Animation team, Hannah Minghella (President of Production), Nate Hopper (Senior VP, Development) and Alexa Amin (VP, Development), we’re looking forward to bringing our unique cartoon talent incubator of big ideas to even bigger screens in the years ahead.
I don’t want to belabor this backstory any more than I have already. Suffice it to say, Frederator’s moving headlong into commercial feature development, and we’re sure hoping we’ll succeed. It’s a big, new market for us, and I think the talented artists and writers we’ve worked with over the years will have a lot to say in the medium.
Basically, we’ve got three approaches to animated feature films that we think will work for us.
• Low budget. In the feature film world that means under $20 million. Samurai Jack’s the first (with Paramount Pictures distributing, and Bad Robot and Frederator Films producing). We’ve got another three or four in development, and I’m sure more coming soon. As always, we like making mass appeal, popular entertainment. We think there’s a lot of big box office, reasonable priced pictures to be made.
• Studio films. These are the big, mostly CG pictures, made [Read more…]
As we zeroed in on how Frederator Films would approach animated feature filmmaking (D’oh! Put the talent first, the same way we did in TV!) I started hanging with the best talent we knew. And, at the head of the list was Genndy Tartakovsky.
That was a pretty easy decision. I was president of Hanna-Barbera when Genndy came to the studio as a key member of Donovan Cook’s 2 Stupid Dogs team. I greenlit his first Dexter’s Laboratory short, and he delivered one of the great cartoons in recent history. Then there was the DL series, also one of the greats. Samurai Jack and Clone Wars were after my time, but I watched Genndy grow as a filmmaker from afar, and I remembered Genndy as one of the best people I’d worked with in my entire career. Talented, smart, dedicated, relentless, amazing leader, moral, and fun. What a rare guy.
Random! Cartoons was really heating up (still called Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Season 4) and we were still taking dozens of pitches. Channel Frederator had moved from a vague concept to an almost reality and learning about internet video in those days (ah, those were the days) wasn’t all that easy. And we finally decided to bite the bullet and go for it on feature films.
Like I’ve said before, we were looking ahead to a slowing kids TV market, we’d plunged into internet video, and we looked at the feature marketplace and realized we had just as unique a spot there as in television. Frederator Films would be stake it’s bet on talent; we weren’t going to be working on “properties” or “franchises.” Our strength had always been believing in artists and writers with a vision, a belief in cartoons and cartoonists; it didn’t look to me like the [Read more…]
I always get very confused moving into a new endeavor, and the contemplation of producing of movies was no different. We don’t know anyone in the movie business, how do we get started? How do other people make animated movies? Do I even like animated movies?
Really, they have to be CG? Really?
But, I’m old enough now to recognize when I’ve been down a similar path before, and in this case I took a deep breath and realized that we’ve never succeeded by being a cog in the wheel, even in a cog business like show business.
The road we’ve taken in cartoons has been to basically ignore the conventional wisdom and create a development and production process that works well for us. Our focus has always been on the talented people who actually create and make films, rather than on ‘concept’ and ‘franchises’ or ‘merchandising’ or ‘who’s-got-the-highest-ratings-let’s-do-what-they-do.’
My great friend, former partner, and writer/producer Alan Goodman (co-creator of Random!’s Bronk & Bongo) stopped by the other day with his friend and colleague, writer/producer Tom Leopold (Seinfeld, Cheers) to share some of their ideas for animated hyrid feature films. Thanks guys.
Basically, I avoided thinking about animated movies throughout Frederator’s history, for reasons I’ve mentioned before. But, I would still call a friend of mine about once a year to talk about it. He’d trained as a filmmaker, worked in business at Disney, was a colleague when Ted Turner made animated movies, and ran Miramax’s Hollywood operation for a number of years, before going back to a big studio. He understood Frederator’s approach, and I thought he’d be a good sounding board. He was so smart about everything that the one phone call was all I needed to avoid thinking any more about Frederator and features.
But I couldn’t shake it. We needed new markets –every producer needs new markets because the writers, directors and animators need more places to create– and movies were a logical step. After about five years my same movie friend moved over to Sony Pictures and I went [Read more…]
We’ve known the happy Daisy Edwards since she was an intern animator for The Meth Minute 39 and animated on the Nite Fite series. So, we were thrilled when she agreed to develop a feature script with us. She was in last week (from her perch two desks away) to tell us the progress on her story.
Movies might be a new market for Frederator, but –
There aren’t too many animated movies released each year.
The popular ones are almost all made by the major studios with their in-house animated units; they’re usually produced for over $100,000,000.
The otherones are often great, but we tend to make mainstream, popular entertainment.
There are some who think only CG movies will succeed. “It’s finished.” We think that’s bs. The inspired filmmaker makes a film work (no matter how they produce it), the audience goes.
Money follows conventional wisdom in the movies business. Understandable.
Our approach to making animated films has never followed conventional wisdom.
