Disney Closes Zemeckis' ImageMovers Studio

Movies have strange accounting. It's hard to really know if most movies are hits. DreamWorks isn't sequelizing Monsters vs. Aliens, even though it grossed about $400 million and certainly made some money. Meanwhile, Dimension thinks more Halloween movies are just what we want. But one surefire way you can tell a movie didn't meet expectations is when a studio dismantles the company that made it. That's what's happened to Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital, which The Los Angeles Times found out will be forced to lay off 450 employees in the next nine months. The reason? Disney Studios' president Alan Bergman says, "Given today's economic realities, we need to find alternative ways to bring creative content to audiences and IMD no longer fits into our business model." Ouch. The between-the-lines stuff on that is that Disney didn't want to subsidize Zemeckis' films anymore because they're just not returning enough of a profit. Here's a little factoid about Zemeckis: Forrest Gump cost a modest $55 million. Since then, he hasn't made a movie that cost less than $90 million, including What Lies Beneath, which somehow had a $100 million budget. And that would be OK, but only one of the six films he's made since 1995 have tripled their production costs worldwide, two if you give What Lies Beneath a $10 million cushion. The news is worse when you look at his performance capture films. None of the three have even doubled their budgets, and that's somewhat surprising given the repeat engagements for The Polar Express. Three strikes, you're out. Disney would still like to enter into a "long-term production deal" with the director, but it sounds like Disney's tired of throwing its own money away. That fits with the new regime at the studio, which is really restricting the type of films it pursues as well as the big budgets it will commit to.

Comments

[J.Bradley]

They could still play "Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol" on tv for a generation or two. I think just technology caught up with him. "Avatar"'s developments will ripple through the industry and so much that looked so advanced over the last decade will seem quaint in this new one. Most movie productions get the people, set up the operation, do the work and then when it's over dismantle everything and even sell the computers they do the work on, on eBay. So having a "studio" that does the work really doesn't fit in to the business model anymore. If somebody's gonna' have a "studio" then they had better be doing like Lucas and they're developing movies, and tv series, and video games. A movie studio - at least the big ones - is already part of a big media entity so those other arms can do that other media. The MOVIE studio only needs to do what it does to make MOVIES and it doesn't need a seperate "studio" to do that.