Frederator Films

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.

I set up the lunch with [Read more…]

The fall of 2005 was pretty insane.

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…]

Cartoon by Nataliedee

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.’

It seems to me [Read more…]

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…]

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 other ones 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.

Hmmmm.

(More to come.)

–Fred 

As I was thinking exactly what to tell you all about wassup with Frederator Films, it occurred to me I ought to fill in a bit of backstory. Or, more specifically–

Why does Frederator want to make movies anyhow?

Without belaboring the obvious, Frederator’s an animated film producer –a non-writing/creating producer– and producers need to produce to keep their doors open. The films we’ve made to date are primarily cartoons for television and specifically, animated series for kids. We’d like to make adult series (actually we have, twice, with The Meth Minute 39, and Nite Fite), but it’s expensive for a small company like ours to develop, and there just aren’t that many adult series that are bought each year. We could go out of business, like many others have, if we concentrated on adult series.

So, we’ve done OK for ourselves by developing and selling kid series to cable networks. For 12 years Frederator [Read more…]

Frederator Films logo designed by Floyd Bishop

It occurred to me today that since we first announced Frederator Films I haven’t been as forthcoming as I’ve tried to be with everything else around here. So I’m going to try to start being a little more active and let you all know what’s what on our quest for the movies.

(More to come.)

–Fred 

Everyone at Frederator Studios has been busy with shorts, series, and now, movies.

[Read more…]