`Fly Away Home” was marked for death–at least in the eyes of Columbia Pictures, says director Carroll Ballard.The movie, about an adolescent girl who raises and trains baby geese to migrate south, was about to be branded with a G rating, which presumably would scare away older kids.
“They thought `Oh my God, we can’t have a G,’ ” Ballard says. “So we had to lay some `wild lines’ (overdubs) where people say a couple of `damns’ and a `Holy (expletive).’ ”
The gambit worked, sort of. “Fly Away Home” received a PG rating as well as rave reviews.
And it fizzled at the box-office anyway.
If most successful live-action family films involve a lovable underdog who bucks tremendous odds, then a great family film someday may be made about the plight of family films.
While Disney’s animated movies routinely have been grossing more than $100 million in recent years (“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is closing in at $97.7 million), live-action films for young audiences have been struggling to recoup their investments.
This summer and fall have been close to disastrous. Studios had high hopes for “Flipper,” “Matilda,” “Alaska,” “Kazaam” and “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” but they all bombed. “Fly Away Home” has received some of the year’s best reviews yet has stalled at $20 million at the box office–failing to match even its production budget.
Even the modest expectations for the gripping real-life nature adventure “The Leopard Son” fell short. Discovery Channel Pictures vice president Linda Isaac says the company hoped the movie would earn between $500,000 and $1 million, but it has stalled at $368,000. About the only success story has been “Harriet the Spy,” which could celebrate its $26.4 million earnings because it cost only about $13 million to make.
“Family movies are just not meeting the level of success that the politicians suggest they should,” says Castle Rock Pictures marketing president Jim Fredrick, whose company produced “Alaska.” “You’ve got Bob Dole complaining about how there should be more family movies, but then you have movies like `Alaska’ and `Fly Away Home’ that have trouble making their money back, and that sends a very clear signal back to Hollywood.”
The widespread sense that kids are growing up faster than ever is reflected in the movie business. “`The Lion King,’ those animated movies, are children’s movies,” Fredrick says. “But after that I think there’s a direct leap right into `Twister’–even `Eraser,’ rated R. I think kids want that juice, those effects, those stars.”
What’s been left behind are the live-action movies that tell a story about kids for kids. “Babe” was a surprise hit last year, but, given that it was about a talking pig, it skirted the boundaries of animation and fantasy.
“Free Willy” is the last notable breakout hit about a flesh-and-blood kid, and it came out in 1993. Filmmakers and studios have been seeking that elusive key to presenting such movies without turning off the intended audience.
“I think `Fly Away Home’ is suffering heavily from being perceived as kind of a namby-pamby kiddie movie, which we did everything to try to avoid,” says Ballard, who also directed 1979’s “The Black Stallion.” “Nowadays there’s this perception of what’s cool and what isn’t among younger people, and what definitely is not cool are all the cornball kiddie movies that have been made over the years.”
On the other hand, he adds, “I think it’s terrible that what’s regarded as cool is flying bodies and death and destruction.”
The director contends that the “silly” studio-ordered profanities and PG rating made little difference as to how audiences received “Fly Away Home” when it opened Sept. 13.
He says the movie was handicapped by its title–discarded titles were “Father Goose” and “Flying Wild”–and the images projected in the studio’s advertising.
“They also put out a lot of still photographs from the picture that I think were totally the wrong things to put out, cutesy pictures of Anna (Paquin) and the little duckies,” Ballard says. “Who wants to go see that movie? Nobody.”
Another problem, he adds, is the studios’ practice of launching movies in thousands of theaters with a big burst of advertising and then yanking them quickly if they don’t ignite. “The Black Stallion,” in contrast, began in just one New York theater and was able to build a sizable audience gradually.
“The Leopard Son” also suffered from being outgunned by the competition when it opened Sept. 27. “How can you fight more than $24 million worth of advertising (on a single movie)?” Isaac asks.
Ideas that hit home
The movies that succeed, Ballard theorizes, are those that instantly communicate an idea to which kids can relate. ” `Home Alone’–it told you everything,” he says. “You saw the kid’s face and the ads and the title, and you knew what you were getting into. `Free Willy,’ I think, is the most successful film in this animal department, and it had a poster of the whale jumping and the little boy and it was called `Free Willy.’ ”
Chris Columbus, who directed the smash “Home Alone” movies (1990 and 1992) as well as “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993) and the upcoming Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Jingle All the Way,” agrees that the most successful family films tend to revolve around a simple, strong concept.
“It sort of strikes a very primal chord in people, whether it’s the fact that a kid is left home alone by himself or a father needs to get back to his family (in `Mrs. Doubtfire’) or something as simple as a father trying to buy that toy on Christmas Eve that he can’t find anywhere for his son (in `Jingle All the Way’),” Columbus says.
He adds that he always aims to entertain the parents as well as their children. “I personally believe that the rating is unimportant when you’re dealing with G or PG,” he says. “The only way a family movie can really break out and do a lot of business is if it entertains everyone. As a parent, if your kids are going to want to go back three and four times, you’re the one who has to drive them, you’re the one who has to sit there with them in the theater.”
One problem may be that many current parents remember the crummy movies they saw as kids in the 1960s and 1970s. “You really had a lot of cheap films being made for kids,” Columbus recalls. “Animation was not up to the level it is now. Family movies just weren’t being treated seriously. I really believe that the pictures have gotten better. I think Steven Spielberg probably started it with `E.T.’ ”
Still, Columbus is at a loss to explain why “Fly Away Home” and last year’s “A Little Princess” failed to catch on. “`A Little Princess’ is an incredibly well-made movie, and it’s very warm and very emotional, and `Fly Away Home,’ I’ve seen it with audiences, people are crying,” he says. “It puzzles me completely.”
Stephen Herek, who directed “The Mighty Ducks” (1992), “Mr. Holland’s Opus” (1995) and the upcoming live-action “101 Dalmatians” for Disney, notes that many recent successful family movies have benefitted from an association with the studio.
“The Disney animated films make hundreds of millions of dollars whereas movies that are made outside of Disney tend to not even open, which I’ve always found kind of mysterious,” Herek says. “Maybe the Disney label (has become) sort of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval. . . . I have a feeling if `A Little Princess’ was released by Disney, it probably would have done a little better.”
The violence quotient
Yet even Disney is trying to toughen up its image regarding live-action family movies. ” `The Mighty Ducks is one of their flagship movies in that it was a family film, but it was probably a little bit harder-edged than some of them,” Herek says. “It wasn’t so much profanity as it was the hockey sequences tended to be a little bit more action-oriented or violent than maybe they might have been 10 or 15 years ago.”
In fact, many hits with the adolescent crowd have shared an abundance of cartoonish violence. The “Home Alone” movies thrived on it, and the trailers for “101 Dalmatians” and “Jingle All the Way” are filled with painful pratfalls.
Columbus disputes that violence is the selling point. “I don’t think it’s primarily pratfalls because every trailer I see now, there are so many pratfalls, and a lot of those pictures don’t do well,” he says. “Look at something like `Dunston Checks In.’ ”
On the other hand, he acknowledges that kids are enjoying harsher material at a younger age. “My nephew in Chicago is obsessed with the `Ace Ventura’ movies, and he’s 7 years old,” Columbus says. “But the `Ace Ventura’ movies are rated PG-13, so they’re really pushing the envelope as far as what a kid that age should see, and his mother’s kind of getting a little discouraged that he’s imitating Ace Ventura.”
In Glenn Close’s Cruella De Vil, “101 Dalmatians” also includes what Herek considers to be an essential children’s movie ingredient: a strong villain.
Children like movies, he says, where “heroes are really heroes because they triumph over something that was really nasty and mean, because there’s a real nice cathartic release at the end of it. I think `Free Willy’ had that, whereas in `Fly Away Home’ it’s a little bit softer.”
“Jingle All the Way,” which opens Nov. 15, is rated PG, while “101 Dalmatians,” which opens Nov. 27, garnered a G rating.
“I assumed it would probably end up being PG because it is live-action and not animated, and it is defintely a little bit edgier movie than the animated version was,” Herek says. “But it went to the ratings board, and it came back G, which kind of shocked me a little bit, but it’s OK.”
He’s certainly not worried that the rating is the kiss of death. “I’m pretty confident that the movie is going to go out and do a pretty decent amount of business,” Herek says. “Again, it’s the Disney machine. They’re putting a ton of money into marketing and advertising it. In many ways it’s been 35 years of advertising since the original film was released as a cartoon.”
