I agree.

Shark Tale with decent WOM and bad reviews had a 3.38 multiplier

As compared to Pixar's The Incredibles with supposed great WOM and great reviews had 3.7 multiplier.

Families' reaction is more important than critics for kids's movies.

The advantage of Madagaskar is: there are NO films for children out now! It has no competition...

Shark Tale also had October with low weekday numbers, and almost no holidays. The Incredibles had an extra 0.1+ added to the multiplier just from Veteran's Day, and add in Thanksgiving and you get more.

SITH is plenty of competition..

Correct on both accounts. Further lots of kids have watched Shrek 2 and Shark Tale Dvds. Madagascar sneak previews were on both dvds and as others have mentioned there is no competition from other family movies at all.

It will do well.. no matter how is reaction from critic..

I saw the trailer and it looks damn fun.. I didn't feel this with Robots and Shark Tale..

51 / 175

Depends on the age and gender of the kids you are talking about.

How is Sith not competition?

I think Madagascar (opening-weekend-wise mostly) is being underpredicted, if anything. A lot of these arguments seem weird to me. No advertisement? Bull. There has been bounds of advertisement. Doesn't look good/won't do well? It's a big CGI kids film! There are none out right now, and even Shark Tale opened wonderfully in a crappy time period, while Madagascar is the kids film starting off the summer season, is getting loads of theatres, and has talking zoo animals getting lots of advertisement.

PEACE, Mike

Well, Revenge of the Sith has pretty bad WOM and everybody says its a crappy. Also, it will drop 94% on its 2nd weekend...

All the 16-25-year-old boys want to see Madagaskar and not the silly Vader vs. Obi-Wan fight... :wink:

I'm not really feeling this film either.

Granted, I'm not the best person to judge how well a movie can appeal to kids, but judging by the trailers Madagaskar is lacking both in action and humour, and the characters don't seem particularly interesting or appealing (except the penguins). I think that eventually the appeal of CGI is starting to wear off and it's not enough by itself to get people to seats. You need good story with good characters as well, and Madagaskar seems so-so in that sense. Just like Shark's Tale and Robots were. Unless the studios are able to deliver Pixar- and Shrek-quality goods, the CGI cartoons are going to deliver diminishing returns from now on.

Maybe it's not time for that yet, but I think it is.

I see 150-170 million for Madagaskar thanks to a summer date and lack of kiddie movie competition. Great numbers, yes, but not a genuine megahit like many seem to expect.

I agree...

The Pixar films and the Shrek films both did incredibly well because they attracted teens & adults in addition to children. Shark Tale, Robots, and Ice Age only appealed to children, thus they had lower box office (all less than $200 million). While Madagascar is opening in the summer - over Memorial Day weekend, to boot - I still think that it's appealing too much to children, and thus won't do as well as the Pixar or Shrek films. But still better than the three others I mentioned above, due to the excellent release date.

Opening Weekend: $60 million / $77 million
Total Domestic Gross: $220 million

I agree with MikeQ

Finding Nemo was the most kid-oriented of the Pixar movies and did quite well...

Actually the fact that it is getting rotten reviews has sealed this movie's fate as possibly below 150 million final gross. In fact, why should it even pass 100 million?

Dont underestimate the kids. If the movie is rotten like on the tomatometer, usually, so is its box office.

What is "kid-friendly" and what is not is a very relative question. But a VERY important thing about Finding Nemo was that it was funny, emotionally involving and while the story itself was generic and episodic, the characters were great.

I'm 28, and I admit that Nemo made me laugh, and more importantly it made me choke up a couple of times. And I'm not a kind of person who gets easily emotionally involved in movies. The strenght of Pixar movies is not just that they are funny and action oriented. They have *heart* and they actually make you feel deeply for the characters.

This is something tha movies like Shark's Tale and Robots miss. And it seems to me that Madagaskar is also too "hip" and doesn't have strong enough characters to make you feel emotionally attached to them. Shrek movies are "hip" as well, but they have some great characters, and in my opinion, heart. When I took my girlfriends 4-year old daughter to see Shrek 2, she was in tears at some points, because the film affected her so much emotionally (And she loved every moment). She also formed an immediate affection and love to all the characters.

I think that heart is very important in kiddie movies, and kids notice immediately when it's missing.

Overall, I am not thrilled at the actors

David Schimmer
Ben Stiller
Jada Smith

and even

Chris Rock - he hasn't hit a home run in awhile. And I guess he has 2 movies opening on the same day with The Longest Yard and this movie - Mad. Must be a nice pay day, at least.

I think the Buzz for Madagascar is higher than WOTW right now. Only Batman Begins and ROTS have more hype IMO.



$55/$190

I think Madagascar will do well, much better than Robots or Shark Tale. In the trailers of Robots and Shark Tale, there wasn't a story. It just set up the theme and threw in a few jokes. Madagascar actually shows parts of the story. Premise is EVERYTHING is movies.

RT 42%

This movie would be now lucky get within 250M of Shrek2. In fact this might make less than Robots. Seems like DW can do well with only Shrek movies.

In my opinion, people use reviews to much to base their predictions on. There's only a few types of reviews that can actually hurt or help a movie like what happened to Alexander.

Reviews in family movies also mean absolutely nothing. The Pacifier and Are We There Yet had some of the worst reviews for family movies this year, and yet they were the best performing (in my opinion) family movies.

Depends on what you mean by "underperform". It won't be another $300+ million hit, I am pretty sure about that. However, I think it will break $200 million pretty easily. Shark Tale opened to $46+ million in October, on a non-holiday weekend with a worse trailer. I think this one will make $50 million over three days without much trouble and should get past $200 million.

This is going to be big,i see it making over 250mill.

The early sign online has been very good. It has been on moviefone since Tuesday, and as we've seen, family films can open in the 20 million range without appearing until Friday morning or 30 million when only appearing as late as Thursday afternoon, so this should be able to do 50 million, or at least moviefone isn't telling us otherwise yet.

I noticed that the TV spots have increased dramatically in quality. It now actually looks pretty funny.