"Wreck-It Ralph 2" The Internet ruins everything · 2:50pm Dec 11th, 2018
EDIT: Thanks to the long holiday season, the movie has just squeaked past what it needed to recoup its budget. It now looks to make a minor profit of $15-$20 million. But with a significantly diminished return ($370 million vs $471 million for the first one), I'd be surprised if there's a third "Ralph" movie unless it's already in production. If they do go ahead with it, the budget will almost certainly be slashed. A $175 million budget is too great a risk for another sequel.
This movie was a cluttered mess which turned every character into an unsympathetic version of themselves overloaded with ads everywhere... basically, it nailed the Internet, probably unintentionally and ironically. Which is why it failed as a movie.
I'm not going to bother going deeply into it... because there's nothing deep about it. It's a textbook unnecessary sequel no one asked for.
And, despite being lauded by Disney sycophants as the 'biggest box-office Disney animated sequel ever'... you know, if you ignore the movies Pixar produced as part of Disney, and the fact that most pure Disney animated sequels came out decades after the original and were usually awful... it's still not going to break even.
Somehow, this movie cost $175 million to produce. Given the 55% studio take of the US box office gross (only 27% for foreign markets), it needs to make more than $350 million globally to recoup its immense budget. Right now, it's sitting at $258 million, and with some mega-movies coming out starting next week, it's just going to keep falling down the box office rankings. I think it'll finish at just over $300 million globally and leave Disney in a $50 million rut.
Compare that with "The Grinch", produced for a mere $75 million, and which (thanks to good release time planning around the holidays) has already passed $325 million worldwide, making a tidy profit for Illumination Studios and its distributor Universal; and it's not done yet. It will definitely pass $350 and may even take a run at $400 million before its box office run is over. This is an example of milking nostalgia done correctly. It doesn't overdo things, keeps to the heart of the original while adding a little more (though it's admittedly rather bland and misses the poignancy of the simple book and original TV special), places itself in the market at just the right time. If you're going to leech off popular things, at least be clever about it!
The lesson here is: if you're going to make a sequel to a movie that already feels like a complete story, it had better be amazing. Audiences have grown wise to lazy forms of sequelitis. This movie is no "Kung-fu Panda 2" or "How to Train Your Dragons 2"; which raised the stakes, the level of character complexity, and the dramatic tension.
You can also go the route of horror flicks and shove out movie diarrhea for near-nothing and make a fortune off the idiot fans of that genre. I mean it, even that GOD-AWFUL PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF AIDS "Slender Man" made a profit! Horror fans, I'm not sorry. You're all retarded. However, I give grudging respect to the studios who're milking you suckers dry while putting forth no money or effort.
Or, if you feel like vomiting out a pointless sequel for a quick buck, don't spend so damn much and stuff it full of scenes audiences already like. That's how the "Back to the Future" and the first "Home Alone" sequel did it. You can usually only get away with that once a franchise, but by then you already have all the people's money in a huge pile in your cavernous mansion and can laugh at their stupidity from your gilded office throne.
This movie felt every bit like a corporate cash grab. Only, it failed to grab much cash. Maybe audiences are learning more quickly than usual! I take full credit for this.