I hope one of the special features is an apology from Jim Davis about the quality of the strip over the past several years. "Sorry, I just don't feel like setting the strip anywhere besides a flat plane."
Never the less, "Planet of the Apes" made more and I don't see a sequel to that. I guess it just shows that families will watch any POS the studios crank out.
I don't know why it would be assumed that families were the primary profit center for this movie. There are plenty of GARFIELD fans, worldwide, out there. It seems to me that GARFIELD fans would have been the main consumers of this movie. After all, the present GARFIELD strip is about as funny as yelling fire in a crowded theater. Yet, the strip still has a large following. It seems reasonable to assume that a lot of fans of the strip would have gone to see this movie at least once, regardless of the quality.
I have to admit I never saw the movie, because I could never get past the stupid ideas of using both live action for the film and a real dog for Odie. They CGI Garfield and then use an ugly, mutant, mutt for the other half of the comedy duo. The whole flick should have been computer animated right from the start. The comic strip has a certain look to it. If they aren't going to recreate that look in the movie then why bother making the movie at all?
It helps to use the reverse mentality here, ask yourself "how well would the FILM translate to a comic strip, instead of the other way around?"
IMO, pretty well, if you break the film up into certain blocks of action, it does almost read like one of those Garfield books.
Also, I don't think that they could really do Garfield 100% accurate to the comic strip like, say, Sin City because it wouldn't really work. Or maybe it would, what do I know, I liked this movie afterall.
I don't believe that they should have made the movie using a technique ala SIN CITY. The movie should have been made along the lines of THE INCREDIBLES: completely computer animated.
Count me in as one of the folks that found "Garfield" entertaining. I skipped the first release, watched it on rental, then again on HBO-HD (the CG for the cat himself is pretty darn good BTW). It's not BAD..which some here (who've never even watched the film itself) have said.
I can't speak for every territory, but in my brief research, it looks like the appropriate Fox subsidiary distributed the film around the world. Even if Fox didn't distribute the film in every territory, it wouldn't affect whether the film had good box office numbers, which was to what I was replying. Who it turned a profit for shouldn't really matter if we're talking generally about the good or bad quality of the box office receipts. Even if we want to focus on Fox alone, if they sold distribution rights in some territories, the pre-sales of those rights may have put the film into the black before the theatrical release even happened.
DavisDVD now says it has been postponed until 2006 (probably to coincide with the sequel). They'll probably stick a Hollywood Movie Money certificate in it & put it out just before the sequel to boost the box office numbers for it. I'm still glad I held off on the one disc (as I do with almost everything from FOX) & I'll wait until it comes out next year.
Since screeners already went out the other day, I'd say DavisDVD is wrong. Granted, it's possible that the screeners went out and the studio changed the release - that's happened before with titles like Duel and Ed Wood - but it's awfully unusual/unlikely...
Weird. When you do a search for it at DVD Empire no release date is listed on the search page - where the numerous Garfield listings are shown. When you access the page for the Purrrfect Collector's Edition it says....
RE-RELEASE: Ships when stock arrives. Scheduled for Re-Release on 12-13-2005 (3 weeks)
Here's DVD Empire's definition of Re-Release
Re-Release Product was available from the Studio but is not at this time. Orders may be generated to reserve a copy for you and the title will "Re-Release" on the date listed.
So that makes it sound like it will be available on December 13th since that's the date they have listed. The release date is usually always shown in the Product Information box too, but it is also missing there. Was this DVD originally scheduled for December 6th? I thought it was always scheduled for the 13th.