Word: studio
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Bringing Pandora to Life Despite Cameron's success with Titanic - the highest-grossing movie of all time and winner of a record-tying 11 Oscars - Avatar was not an easy sell to his home studio, 20th Century Fox. Since 1997, Cameron had been largely absent from the Hollywood scene, riding in submersibles, shooting documentaries and building new filmmaking toys. In 2005, Fox funded a $10 million, 5-min. prototype for the movie, but when Cameron delivered a 153-page draft of the script months later, the studio balked. Here was an ambitious project with a lot of risky elements, including...
With more than 2,500 special-effects shots, the bulk of the man-hours on Avatar were spent not on a stage but in a dark viewing room in Los Angeles, in teleconferences with collaborating artists from Peter Jackson's Weta Digital studio in Wellington, New Zealand. The real world was being used to inform the fictional one: an energy map of the Pandoran forest was modeled on rat neurons; hours were spent getting alien sap to drip precisely right. (See the 10 worst video game movies...
...heroine of The Princess and the Frog puts her big dreams to music, singing, "I'm almost there." That's the position of Disney's 2-D animated feature, which opened wide Friday. It won this preholiday weekend, according to early studio estimates, but with a tepid $25 million, a bit less than forecast by industry analysts. Rather than reaching the stratosphere of Pixar 3-D cartoons, Princess replicated the openings of Disney's recent in-house animation efforts like Meet the Robinsons and Bolt. Execs at the Mouse House hope their new film will play well through the Christmas...
...pictures from an X-ray studio...
...weekend. But those rooting for an underdog had plenty to cheer about. The Blind Side - the true-life sports movie about a determined white woman and her adopted black son - finally overtook the vampires and werewolves of The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the North American wickets, according to studio estimates. And none of the three debut films in wide release could earn even half of what The Blind Side did. The only movie to spark hopes of box-office gelt and Oscar gold, Up in the Air, opened in limited release. (Read "The Blind Side: What...