High-flying Chicken Rockets Toward $100 Million Mark

Walt Disney Pictures' Chicken Little, the story of a boisterous bantam's struggle to overcome the humiliation of past mistakes, find acceptance in his father's eyes, and gain redemption by saving the world from alien invasion—or least acorn harvesting, retained its perch at the top of the box office this past weekend.

Walt Disney Feature Animation's (WDFA) first fully CG-animated film did an estimated $32 million dollars in its second weekend, a drop of only 20% from the previous weekend's total gross. By contrast, Jarhead, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, which also opened last weekend, fell nearly 56% from its previous weekend total. Earlier this year, DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar dropped 40.5% between its Memorial Day weekend opening and the first non-holiday weekend. Madagascar went on to gross more than $193 million domestically before closing in mid-October.

Chicken Little rocketing his way to success.
© 2005 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

This weekend's estimated total brings the cocky young cockerel's 10-day take to roughly $80.8 million. At this pace, Chicken Little should easily be able to scratch out $100 million domestically by the coming weekend.

Chicken Little, which may have been aided in part by the Veterans Day holiday, also out performed new comers Zathura: A Space Adventure and Derailed. Coming in second at the box office, Zathura, from Elf director Jon Favreau, took in an estimated $14 million. The Jennifer Aniston-Clive Owen thriller Derailed opened in the number three spot with an estimated take of $12.8 million.

Chicken Little and the Halo Effect

The fourth filmed installment of J. K. Rowling's orphaned wizard-in-training saga, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is scheduled to hit theatres Friday, November 18, on over 3,800 screens. If past Potter premieres are any indication, thousands of parents with kids in tow may arrive at local multiplexes only to find that all of Goblet's afternoon and early evening screenings are sold out. When that happens, something akin to the iPod halo effect may occur.

The unparalleled sales success of Apple's popular iPod music player is being given credit for boosting sales of Apple's Macintosh computers. Parents who've schlepped the kids all the way to the movie house on a chilly November weekend aren't likely to just turn around and go home if they can't get the family in to see Harry and company work their magic. This means that, in addition to his famous lightening bolt scar, Harry, like the iPod, may just sprout a halo as frustrated moms and dads turn to Disney and Chicken Little to help them salvage what was supposed to be a fun family outing.

Oh, Snap!

It's pretty safe to say Chicken Little's performance at the box office caught everyone, including Disney, off guard. Prior to its release, the studio was publicly mum on the subject of what it considered a good opening weekend for the film would be. Privately, industry insiders joked that Disney executives were lighting candles, burning incense, and bargaining with higher powers for at least a strong second-place finish and an opening weekend total of $18 to $20 million.

With Chicken Little fast approaching the $100 million mark, the question around town now is "Who could have seen this coming?"

It turns out that we here at o-meon.com should have.

Like just about everyone else with a website, we closely track our daily, weekly, and monthly usage statistics, or webstats. Early last spring, we began to notice an up tic, above and beyond our projections, in the number of unique visits to o-meon.com.

At the time, we believed the increase in traffic was due to greater than anticipated interest in the start of Disneyland's 50^th Anniversary celebration, The Happiest Homecoming on Earth. As time went on, however, and Disneyland's 50^th birthday July 17 came and went, our numbers continued to climb.

Shortly after our August 9 story, Reporter's Notebook: SIGGRAPH 2005, which briefly mentioned Chicken Little, we experienced another spike in the number of unique visits to o-meon.com. At about the same time, we also noticed a change in our list of top 30 sites referring visitors to our site and a dramatic change in the top 20 search strings used to help people find our stories.

In August, the online community portal service myspace.com "a place for friends," joined web sites AnimatedNews.com, ScreamScape.com, and AnimationNation.com as one of the largest non-Google referrers to o-meon.com. In addition, search strings such as "chicken little," "chickenlittle," and "chicken little pictures" began taking over the list of top 20 search strings used to refer visitors to o-meon.com.

November search strings for o-meon.com.

Further examination of our webstats revealed a tremendous interest in any and all information about Chicken Little as readers downloaded images and stories as far back as our November 9, 2004 story, Is the Sky About to Fall (Again) at WDFA?

As Chicken Little's opening day approached, myspace.com became the top referrer to o-meon.com. It was joined in the top 30 by sites and discussion boards as diverse as the Michael Jackson Forum and AsianBookies.com (don't ask, we have no idea).

So high was the demand for news and information about Chicken Little that our total number of unique visits to o-meon.com for the month of October were twice that of July, our previous highest traffic month. Following Chicken Little's November 4 opening, our traffic surged again as tens of thousands of visitors downloaded our stories about the movie's premiere and opening (Disney's Chicken Little Premiere, and Chicken Little… the Un-Review).

In the first six days of November, o-meon.com exceeded the total number of unique visits for the entire month of October.

Hindsight being 20-20, it's clear that there was tremendous interest all along among fans and filmgoers of all kinds in Chicken Little, and it is that pent up demand for this project that's led to its box office success. Given the negative reviews and widespread criticism of Disney animation in the media that preceded the film, it's equally as clear, now, that none of the so-called experts, including us, had a clue as to how much audiences were anticipating this film.

Or, maybe someone did have a clue as to how to keep his finger on the pulse of the ticket buying public. Earlier this year, Twentieth Century Fox and Fox TV parent company News Corporation, run by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, swallowed up myspace.com parent InterMix Media. What makes this deal all the more interesting is that it's Disney's new boss Bob Iger who's supposed to be the techno-savvy CEO, not Murdoch.

Rumor Roundup

Perhaps no movie in history, save for Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or David O. Sleznick's magnum opus Gone With the Wind, has generated as much prerelease publicity, both good and bad, as Disney's Chicken Little. For most of its production cycle, the fate of Disney feature animation seemed to be tied directly to that of Chicken Little.

For more than a year, agents and headhunters in the Los Angeles area quietly prepared to submit portfolios and resumes to Disney Studio executives, for everything from creative executives to marketing and public relations managers, such was the buzz on what would happen if Chicken Little laid an egg.

The rumormongering reached fever pitch just two days before Chicken Little opened. Late on the evening of November 2, animation historian Jerry Beck posted the following item on his website, CartoonBrew.com, about Chicken Little director Mark Dindal:

"....word has spread that director Mark Dindal has quit (Walt Disney) studio - two days before ("Chicken Little") opens."

Beck, the author of several well-received books on the art and history of animation, amended the posting later the following morning saying that Dindal may not have left Disney but, rather, he'd left the country to promote Chicken Little overseas. By noon of that same day, all mention of Dindal and his whereabouts were removed without further comment from CartoonBrew.com

By the time CartoonBrew.com removed the Dindal story from their site, it had already been picked up by several discussion boards and fan sites. Throughout most of that Thursday, the switchboards at the Walt Disney Company lit up with requests from journalists seeking information regarding Dindal's employment status within the Mouse House. It took the Disney studio's press and publicity department most of the day to suss out what was going on, and confirm that their director was happily on his was to Europe to promote the movie, before they could formally and officially deny the story.

How did a thing like this get started? It may have been a chain reaction of sorts.

During Chicken Little's October 30 premiere, Disney studio's press and publicity department lined up a select number of red carpet photo ops and interviews for director Mark Dindal and producer Randy Fullmer. The few select media took up so much of Dindal and Fullmer's time that the pair was virtually unable to walk the press line, pose for pictures, or answer questions from the bulk of the media covering the premiere. As a result, during the days following the premiere their offices were inundated with calls for comment.

According to a technical supervisor on Chicken Little, two days before the movie opened, an assistant answering calls on Wednesday responded to several requests to speak to Mark Dindal by saying, "He's left the studio," which, in fact, he had for the overseas promotional tour. "So everybody's going, 'hmmm…'" the technical supervisor said. "Nobody's seen them; they're not going to be at the ASIFA (Hollywood) screening." And the next thing you know, the Internet is abuzz with the story of Mark Dindal leaving Disney.

As for Dindal himself, the technical supervisor called him in Paris and said, "Hey Mark, I hear you quit the studio. And he said, 'WHAT!' Then we tell them (Dindal and Fullmer) the rumor, and they just started laughing and went, 'Oh my God.'"

It's often said that success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan. That certainly can be said of Chicken Little, now that it can clearly be chalked up in the win column. Contrary to the buzz that preceded the film, there's virtually no news, gossip, rumor, or innuendo of any kind leaking out of the Mouse House now. Industry analysts who as recently as two weeks ago were openly speculating about a complete reorganization at WDFA, will only go so far now as to wonder if Bob Iger had wanted to make changes in the feature animation department he inherited from his old boss as to how he might go about it now that WDFA has a bona fide hit on its hands.

How indeed.

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