Latest news with #DreamWorks
The Sun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Shrek's Adventure is the best family day out – and you can get two tickets with Sun Superdays
IF the stress of the looming school holidays has left you feeling ogreish, it might be time to ship the kids off to a land Far Far Away. The brilliantly bonkers Shrek's Adventure! London, located on the buzzing South Bank, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this summer. 4 4 4 This immersive, family attraction has ten fairytale-themed live shows to explore, featuring real-life actors, special effects and DreamWorks Animation, in search of The BGG (that's Big Green Guy). Excited squeals My sons, George, five, and three-year-old Olly, were enchanted as we boarded the 4D flying bus driven, erratically, by their favourite character, Donkey. Water was squirted at us as we veered too close to a river, and the wind whipped our hair as we zoomed into the clouds. Cue lots of excited squeals. Hundreds of thousands of Shrek fans, including celeb mums Myleene Klass and Amy Childs, pay a visit to Shrek's Adventure! London every year. No wonder it is a TripAdvisor Traveller's Choice. On our visit, we 'crashed' the bus and bumped off one of Rumpelstiltskin's favourite witches, and were then tasked with collecting ingredients to make an escape potion. Audience participation, especially getting grown-ups to do silly things, is at the heart of this hilarious experience. Cinderella persuaded my husband Patrick, 39, to put his hand down the loo in search of gold. The kids went wild as loud fart noises filled the room. A fortune teller then directed us to the Poison Apple Pub, where we danced with barmaid Doris and bumped into Puss in Boots. Shrek fans stunned as Hollywood A-lister makes shock appearance in new teaser as ogre's teenage daughter 4 George delighted in being given one of the cat's (gross) furballs — necessary for our magic brew, apparently. We got lost in the Mirror Maze — Olly was in awe, 'Mummy, there are loads of us!' — before Sleeping Beauty saved us. Despite the fact she kept dozing off, to much amusement, we reached The Bakery, where the Muffin Man helped us mix the elixir, spurred on by 'Gingy' The Gingerbread. The kids gasped as the cauldron bubbled. Just when we thought it was all over, we were thrown in prison. Plot twist. Fortunately, Princess Fiona was there to help us make our getaway. We were then congratulated on our heroism by Shrek, who greeted us with high-fives, before we headed back into the real world. Shrek's Adventure! London is far far and away the best day out. If only we could spend all summer there.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘How To Train Your Dragon' Earns Composer John Powell His Biggest Hit Album
John Powell's How to Train Your Dragon debuts on the Official Soundtrack Albums chart and on the ... More Official Album Downloads chart, earning the composer his new career peak. LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JUNE 07: John Powell attends Universal Pictures presents the Los Angeles premiere of DreamWorks "How To Train Your Dragon" at Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on June 07, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by) Since being released in mid-June, How to Train Your Dragon has quickly become one of the highest-grossing movies of 2025 globally. The live-action remake of the animated film of the same name, which was originally released back in 2010, ranks among the 10 most successful titles this year, with more than $370 million earned thus far, and it's still just getting started. The media property is so popular that the music backing the film has also become commercially success in the United Kingdom. John Powell Returns to the Charts John Powell scored How to Train Your Dragon – both the live-action reworking and the original – and this week, he earns a new hit on the charts in the U.K. The accompanying music opens at No. 13 on the Official Soundtrack Albums chart and No. 41 on the Official Album Downloads ranking. How to Train Your Dragon Opens High This week, How to Train Your Dragon secures the top start on the Official Soundtrack Albums chart. Powell's latest effort outpaces M: Son of the Century by Tom Rowlands, the album connected to Death Stranding 2 by Woodkid, and The Ballad of Wallace Island, which is credited to both Carey Mulligan and her co-star Tom Basden. Over on the Official Album Downloads chart, competition is much tougher. On that ranking, Powell is up against all musical acts — not just soundtracks — and How to Train Your Dragon doesn't manage to beat new projects from stars like Van Morrison, The Cure, Queens of the Stone Age, and Neil Young, which all launch in higher positions. John Powell Hits a New Career High Powell earns just his second hit on the Official Album Downloads chart, and he reaches a new career high as a credited artist. In 2019, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World – the soundtrack tied to the animated film's sequel – spent a single frame at No. 51. On the Official Soundtrack Albums chart, the two-time Oscar nominee scores a milestone tenth appearance, though he misses his all-time peak by just one space. Back in 2007, the music Powell created for The Bourne Ultimatum climbed as high as No. 12 — just one position above where he sits now.
BBC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Elio and the problem with today's kids' films
Pixar's Elio has had the worst-ever box office opening for a film from the animation studio. It's part of a wave of original family cartoons failing at the box office. In big-time animation studio Pixar's new cartoon, Elio, a boy is beamed up from Earth and into outer space, but the film itself hasn't taken off. The film made just $21m (£15m) at the US box office over its opening weekend, and $14m (£10m) globally, which counts as the worst ever opening of a Pixar film. DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon sold almost twice as many tickets, despite having been out for a week already. And even Danny Boyle's shot-on-an-iPhone zombie adventure 28 Years Later pulled in more viewers. What a difference a year makes. Last June, Pixar's previous film, Inside Out 2, was well on its way to making almost $1.7 billion, and cementing its status as 2024's biggest film worldwide. And it wasn't alone. An article in the Times last December hailed 2024 as "a new era for family films", adding that "the pandemic slump is officially over and a new saviour of the box office has returned to Hollywood". Other child-friendly titles cited in the article were Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which together had made about $6.85 billion. But while it's hard to argue with the figures, it's just as hard to ignore that the fact that all of these films revolve around existing intellectual properties. This year, the biggest family films include A Minecraft Movie and live-action CGI remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. But the crashing and burning of Elio suggests that it's much more challenging for films to succeed if they aren't sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations of video games, or some unholy combination of the above. When it comes to younger viewers, it seems, it's lack of familiarity that breeds contempt. There have been some original children's films that have been profitable recently, including The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot (although both are adapted from books). But what we haven't seen lately is the kind of newly minted mega-hit that sells toys and gets turned into a Broadway musical: the days of such franchise-starting phenomena as The Lion King, Toy Story and Frozen seem to be over. As Brooks Barnes noted in the New York Times on Sunday, DreamWorks' Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken and Illumination's Migration both underperformed in 2023. Disney's centenary cartoon, Wish, was another 2023 flop. Disney's Strange World, which was released in 2022, is one of its biggest ever box-office bombs. Pixar's Onward fared poorly in 2020. And two other original Pixar films, Soul and Turning Red, went straight to Disney+. Some of this can be blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic. In certain cases, films were scuppered by a general decline in cinema-going; in other cases, films were denied cinema releases at all; and people in lockdown got used to watching new films at home. But that's not the whole story – and "story" could be the operative word. The underlying problem with the family films which have failed in the 2020s is that they don't have plots which are clear and exciting enough to grip viewers of all ages and attention spans. A story with too many cooks Elio, for instance, is the sweet and lively tale of a lonely boy learning to open himself to friendship, but its narrative rambles all over the place. There are too many scenes before Elio leaves Earth and reaches a psychedelic alien craft called the Communiverse. And then the film packs Elio off to a villain's spaceship. And then he's back in the Communiverse. And then he's on Earth. And then he's in the Communiverse again. And did I mention that there's an Elio clone on Earth for some of the time? It's hardly surprising if younger viewers aren't too sure of what he is doing and why. The film's origins could help to explain matters. Elio was due to be directed by Adrian Molina, using ideas drawn from his own childhood on a military base, but then last June Domee Shi (director of Turning Red) was announced at the new director; last August, Madeline Sharafian was announced as her co-director; and three different screenwriters are credited. Perhaps this particular broth just had too many cooks. But numerous family films are similarly over-stuffed and over-complicated. It's head-achingly difficult to summarise the convoluted plots of Soul, Strange Planet, Onward and Wish – whereas in the case of Pixar's classic Finding Nemo, the title is the plot. What connects these recent films appears to be a studio's nervousness about letting a writer-director tell a fun, simple story. Animated films are notoriously expensive – Elio is reputed to have cost $150m (£110m) – so there is an understandable impulse to keep refining a scenario, paying more and more writers to add more and more details to its fictional world. But this committee-oriented method isn't the best way to craft a streamlined plot. More like this:• 10 of the best films to watch this June• The darkest kids' film ever made?• Why Disney flopped in its centenary year "You can feel a need to have another script meeting in which they plot their way out of trouble with another layer of story or another dimension," Jason Solomons, a British film critic-turned-producer, tells the BBC. "Even these lesser films are always extremely thought-out, but in tying up all their loose ends, giving punchlines to every joke, and an arc to every character, sometimes you feel the mechanism creaking, straining to make it all work with the customary almost obligatory smoothness. Maybe a little craziness, a rough edge here and there, would do them the world of good?" That's not to say that the various sequels and spin-offs which dominate the family-film market are models of economical storytelling, but that's not so crucial when the audience is familiar with the material before the film starts. Viewing habits in the post-pandemic era involve a lot more phone-scrolling and chatting than they did just a few years ago, but cinema-goers don't have to concentrate to follow a remake of How to Train Your Dragon or Lilo & Stitch: they know what's happening, anyway. The challenge for studios now is to engross audiences in stories that they don't already know. -- If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Pixar suffers its worst box office opening ever as $150M movie Elio bombs with $21M debut
DreamWorks' live-action take on How to Train Your Dragon continued its run atop the box office, but a new Pixar film made franchise history... in the worst way. How to Train Your Dragon dropped a decent 56.3% in its second frame to win with an estimated $37 million, followed by 28 Years Later with $30 million and Pixar's Elio with $21 million in second and third places, respectively. Elio's box office debut was the worst opening weekend for any modern film in Pixar history, according to Variety. The debut is not only below Elemental, which debuted in June 2023 with $29.6 million, but below Pixar's first film ever, 1995's Toy Story, which opened in November 1995 with $29.1 million. Elio - which follows a young boy mistaken as an ambassador for Earth after he invited aliens to come visit - received a good marks from critics and moviegoers on Rotten Tomatoes, with ratings of 84% and 91% respectively. The film earned only $14 million in overseas markets for an abysmal worldwide total of $35 million. The film opened in 3,750 theaters, earning a middling $5,600 per-screen average, with the film's box office projections putting it between $25 million and $30 million, though fans clearly didn't show up as much as previously believed. Elio was produced under a $150 million budget, and with a $35 million global debut, it seems unlikely that it could turn a profit, barring some kind of box office miracle. 'This is a weak opening for Pixar,' says David A. Gross, who runs the FranchiseRe movie consulting firm. 'These would be solid numbers for another original animation film, but this is Pixar, and by Pixar's remarkable standard, the opening is well below average,' Gross added. How to Train Your Dragon remained perched at the top of the box office its second week in theaters, in spite of some tough new competition. The live-action adventure starring Miles Thames, Nico Parker and Gerard Butler earned less than half of the $84 million it collected on its opening weekend, but garnered a respectable $37 million in ticket sales. Fans of the franchise breathed fire into international showings, which earned an additional $53 million, for a global total so far of $358,189,295. Second place went to the fright flick 28 Years Later, which earned $30 million from 3,444 theaters for a solid $8,710 per-screen average. Jodie Comer and Aaron Taylor-Johnson star in the apocalyptic thriller about a group of survivors living on an island nearly three decades after a rage virus has infected most of the world. It will be interesting to see how long this newcomer remains popular at the box office as critics have given the fright flick a strong 89-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas audiences gave it a much less enthusiastic 65-percent score. 28 Years Later is the sequel to 2002's 28 Days Later, with Alex Garland returning as scriptwriter and Danny Boyle reprising his role as director. The thriller scared up some $45 million domestically and nearly $30 million overseas for a debut total of $74.9 million. Disney's live action Lilo & Stitch dropped to fourth place, earning $9.7 million across the US. The family friendly romp has been one of the most successful of 2025 so far with global earnings of $910.3 million, coming in behind A Minecraft Movie with $953.5 million and the Chinese animated fantasy film, Ne Zha 2, which has earned nearly $2 billion worldwide. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning rounded out the top five with $6.55 million domestically. The last film in the Tom Cruise lead franchise never found its footing at the box office after debuting in a distant second behind Lilo & Stitch. International audiences have been more welcoming to the film, paying more than $362 million to see the nearly three hour long action flick for a global total of $540.8 million. Second place went to the fright flick 28 Years Later. Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars in the apocalyptic thriller which earned $45 million domestically and nearly $30 million overseas for a debut total of $74.9 million Materialists, the romantic comedy starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans plummeted from third place to sixth its second weekend in theaters. Critics loved the mature love story, but it hasn't caught on with audiences amidst all the competition from family friendly and action films. Materialists collected nearly 50-percent than its opening weekend take, pulling in a mere $5.8 million. The rom-com hasn't gained much traction around the planet either, making only an additional $7.5 million internationally. Ballerina, starring Ana De Armas as an assassin bent on revenge, followed in seventh place. The action thriller from the world of John Wick bowed this week with a little more then $4.5 million in ticket sales. In spite of good reviews from audiences, Ballerina has not fared well with ticket buyers domestically, although on the international stage it's collected another $49.7 million for a worldwide total of more than $100 million so far. Karate Kid: Legends starring the original 'Kid' Ralph Macchio along with martial arts master Jackie Chan waxed on at number eight with $2.4 million in ticket sales Karate Kid: Legends starring Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio waxed on at number eight with $2.4 million in ticket sales. Final Destination: Bloodlines crash landed at number nine with $1.88 million. Newcomer Kuberaa, the latest offering from India, debuted at number 10. The morality tale about a beggar who undergoes a radical transformation to make his way in the world garnered $1.75 million. Brad Pitt will speed into the box office race next weekend with the highly anticipated F1: The Movie, along with the scary M3gan 2.0, giving some competition the family friendly offerings that have made their mark on the summer blockbuster season.
Pink Villa
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Pink Villa
Box Office: How to Train Your Dragon soars high, breaching USD 350 million through second weekend
The live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon, which released last week, has reached a big milestone. It has grossed a terrific USD 350 million around the world at the box office. This shows how much people still love this story, which started as an animated movie in 2010 from DreamWorks. The Dean DeBlois directorial starring Mason Thames has grabbed the attention of audiences everywhere and is doing really well financially; a good sign for the future of the series. How To Train Your Dragon Tops USD 350 Million At The Global Box Office By The End Of 2nd Weekend In its second weekend overseas, the movie earned USD 53.6 million. This is a small drop of little over 50 percent from its first week, which included special preview screenings. So far, it has made USD 197.7 million internationally, and Japan hasn't even started showing it yet In the United States, How To Train Your Dragon has done great, earning USD 160.5 million. When you add that to the earnings from other countries, the total is USD 358.2 million worldwide. This is a big deal because the movie cost USD 150 million to make, not counting the money spent on ads, and required around USD 375-400 million to theatrically breakeven, which it will in a couple of days. How To Train Your Dragon Aims For A USD 650 Million Global Finish The Universal movie could make anywhere between USD 630 million and USD 670 million by the end of its run, based on its trend. The top places where it has made money apart from U.S. and Canada are Mexico with USD 24.5 million, and China with USD 23.2 million. Countries in Europe like the UK, Spain, and France have also helped a lot. Comparing it to the original animated movies, the 2010 How to Train Your Dragon made USD 494 million, and the 2014 sequel made USD 621 million. The 2025 movie shall comfortably beat those numbers. The fact that it brings back memories for people who loved the original movies has helped it do well. How To Train Your Dragon Shall Have Sequels In The Years To Follow The success of How to Train Your Dragon shows that people still want to see these kinds of movies. It also means there will be a sequel, because the makers are sure people will keep liking it.
