Attila the Professor said:
Le Sab, are you posing "animated series" here to mean an animated film series? Otherwise, I'm guessing that an animated television series would cost a heck of a lot less.
I'm suggesting that animation, whether that's on teevee or theatrical, is an absolute non-starter. There's no real upside for anybody.
While
The Simpsons and
Family Guy have been wildly successful, animation and anime have made very few inroads with adults. The much lauded
Batman: The Animated Series couldn’t find an audience on Sunday nights opposite 60 Minutes, and was relegated to the more traditional afterschool block where it was phenomenally successful.
Why is that? I don’t know, but I suspect that it’s a cultural truism at this point in time. After a generation and a half were raised on Disney’s form of family entertainment, it’s accepted without question. If you see a cartoon advertised or, Allah forbid, on the air, move along. It’s for children.
Now there’s a general trend in television animation away from action-oriented cartoons. For starters, they’re expensive. The more moving parts on the screen, the more expensive it becomes. Somebody needs to draw all of that. Did you blow up a building? Your background art needs to be redrawn/reset. That takes time and money. The more “in-between” animation – that is, the frames between the key frames that give the illusion of movement – you have to dedicate more time and resources. That difference in frames is why Disney animation traditionally has been superior to, say, Hanna-Barbera. Disney ran at the traditional 24fps, and Hanna-Barbera ran between 4 & 14fps. A lot of anime has similarly low frame rates.
Secondly, there’s the issue of what we’ll call “shelf-space.” With only a relative few hours in the broadcast day, there are a fixed number of shows that can air at any given time. While adults might not have a problem focusing for an hour long program, children get bored easily. They aren’t going to sit still long enough to care what’s going on. So, 22-minutes it is. That leaves you eight minutes of advertising in a thirty-minute program block. Not exactly a lot of time.
Numbers vary, of course, but the average cost for a thirty second spot during primetime was $110,000. So over your allotted eight minutes of commercials you’ll make $1.7-million. Not bad, right? Well, no. That’s for a primetime spot on one of the major networks. Cartoons don’t air on primetime, and they don’t air on major networks anymore. Niche networks, like The CW, peaked out $75-grand per spot.
Assume that an Indiana Jones animated teevee series airs on Disney XD. Well, it’s airing at a substantial loss because Disney doesn’t allow outside advertising. Promos for other Disney shows and products, sure, but you won’t be seeing an ad for
Kung-Fu Panda 3. Disney, of course, doesn’t pay to advertise its own offerings on its own channels.
Let’s say Disney allows the same series to air on the Cartoon Network. Their standard appears to be $25-grand per 10-seconds. Assuming advertising get a volume discount, let’s bump it up to a flat fifty grand for thirty seconds. $100-thousand per minute over 8-minutes nets you $800,000. Still, not bad. I wouldn’t mind having that kind of money. It’s a net loss for the production company, though.
Trying to find official numbers has been difficult, but it’s been estimated that
Ultimate Spider-Man costs $1.6-million.
The Simpsons and
Family Guy, by comparison, cost two-three million-plus* per episode. Since this will ultimately be a Disney production, I suspect an Indiana Jones cartoon will cost about the same as
Ultimate Spider-Man. Why? Marvel’s characters are visually complex, and require a significant amount of “inbetweening” to do justice to their respective powers. Dr. Jones will require the same type of treatment as he defies death week-in, week-out. Add in the major destruction to exotic sets, and the purely animation costs rack up. Just how high depends on the season length, but since
Ultimate Spider-Man runs 26-episodes per season I would expect the same. So, at $1.6-million per episode you’re looking at $41.6-million over the length of a standard season.
Sample of
Ultimate Spider-Man:
How does Disney make their money back? The hypothetical teevee series operates at a massive loss on Disney’s channels, a large loss on a niche network, and might eke out a miniscule profit if it could find an audience during the primetime schedule. Miniscule gets it canned after a season, but it gets yanked mid-way through its run only to be replaced by a low risk, high reward sitcom or reality show. The remaining episodes can be found on-line.
The answer, of course, to Disney’s monetization dilemma is toys. Lots of toys. $41.6-million is a rounding error for Spider-Man since he accounts for ~$700-million in merchandising sales alone. Dr. Jones can’t hope to ever match that kind of muscle without significant “repositioning.” In this case, it turns into something like… Adventure Friends! Indy will head up a multi-national, United Benetton of Explorers featuring a girl, a black guy, an Asian dude, and, maybe, somebody of Hispanic origin. Maybe a First Nations pal to round things out.
If anybody is interested in animation's cost per minute, do check out this report Cartoon Brew put out on the independent scene for a sense of scale.
Moedred said:
...but for now assume by Iger's statement it would cost much less that $100M to leave Paramount on the sidelines.
The actual price of those distribution rights aren’t the problem. Iger will cut the check, but digging through
the transcript reveals some interesting facts. To begin with, only 25% of Lucasfilm’s business lies in films. It’s also very toy and North America-centric. Per Disney’s FY11 revenue breakdown, less than 40% of Lucasfilm business is derived from overseas. At the time of Marvel’s acquisition in ’09, over 40% of their business came from overseas. That’s a significant disparity, and Disney obviously sees a substantial return on any investment there.
Star Wars, of course, being the driving force.
It comes down to capital allocation, and with such outsized returns on a relatively minimal investment, it's obvious where The Walt Disney Company's attention is going to be focused for the next decade.
*- The Simpsons": 6 voice actors -- $400,000 per episode. Script and production costs, retake costs: $900,000- $1.5 million = $3.3 million-$3.9 million.
kongisking said:
If it were done similarly to Batman: The Animated Series (animation and story-qualitywise, I mean. Calm down, everyone) or Gargoyles
You're way too young to be name checking either of those shows.