Ne moves acton12/31/2023 ![]() ![]() This year's new slate brings us everything from assassins on a train, to Santa Claus in a hostage situation, to a cat in knee-high boots (the Puss in Boots sequel, naturally). The point is: Action movies are exciting, and sometimes they're just what you need. Or *checks this year's list of movies* drive an ambulance really fast.? Even if you go into the theater feeling bummed out, when you exit one of these films, you'll feel ready to take down a stereotypical supervillain. Given the box office track record Illumination’s accumulated over the years, it’s hard to dispute the idea that the studio made the right call in ditching plans for live-action productions.If you really want pure movie escapism, one of the best genres you can choose is action. ![]() While the studio’s animated output is certainly still reminiscent of other features from rival studios, the success of Despicable Me seemed to encourage Illumination brass to make more movies like that 2010 sleeper hit rather than exclusively lean on mimicking Fox hits. Initially, Illumination was meant to just mimic the hits of Meledandri’s old stomping grounds at 20th Century Fox. In the context of history, Illumination’s initial embrace and then gradual quiet eschewing of live-action properties show how the company has evolved over the years. Given how bad and derivative Hop was, not to mention how the proposed live-action Illumination features were all rehashes of old brands, it’s hard to be too mournful of Illumination getting out of the live-action cinema game. Perhaps someday they’ll return to this medium for storytelling, but for now, the focus appears to be exclusively on animated features. As the mid-2010s approached, Illumination had no more live-action family movies in the pipeline and Hop was becoming more and more of a distant memory. It was more like a quiet truth people gradually began to pick up on. There was no massive or dramatic announcement that Illumination had gotten out of the live-action movie biz. Those kinds of costs would run counter to Illumination’s famous love for keeping its movies as cheaply budgeted as possible. Plus, live-action filmmaking can be an expensive endeavor, and something like Pluto, with its futuristic world dominated by robots, would easily need a $100+ million budget to be realized. What on Earth does a Where’s Waldo? film even look like? It’s not like other Illumination films are masterpieces of screenwriting, but it’s easy to see Illumination artists and executives gravitating towards concepts like The Secret Life of Pets or Sing that don’t have to bend over backward to justify their existence. Part of the issue with Illumination’s live-action division was in tackling pre-existing characters who are famous but also don’t have enough personality to hinge a whole movie on. This was in spite of none of those earlier live-action Illumination movies making any progress in development. Even with box office grosses that were more “OK” than extraordinary, Illumination continued to announce new live-action features, including a Clifford the Big Red Dog adaptation in 2012. The film managed to outgross other live-action/CGI kid’s movies from the same era ( like Yogi Bear), but it certainly didn’t bring down the box office as the first Despicable Me had a few months earlier. In 2011, Hop hit theaters and ended up doing…fine. A studio that had barely any animation experience a dead earlier was now giving Pixar a run for its money at the worldwide box office. The biggest victory in his time at Fox was when the studios Blue Sky Studios branch released the smash hit Ice Age and ensured Fox's dominance in the field of big-screen animation. ![]() Under Meledandri's leadership, 20th Century Fox delivered more consistent and lucrative motion pictures (after the 2000 film Titan A.E. There weren’t decades of prior smash hits Fox could turn to for guidance on how to make and release animated features. Meledandri hadn't introduced the idea of 20th Century Fox distributing animated movies, but the studio didn't have a lengthy history with the retiform. This outfit would be led by Chris Meledandri, a man who had previously overseen the animation units at 20th Century Fox. This studio was launching a production company that would eventually take on the name of Illumination. At the start of 2007, the news broke that Universal Pictures was making a big bid for family entertainment.
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