Ice Age: Milking a Franchise Dry

three billion two hundred sixteen million seven hundred eight thousand five hundred fifty three that is the total domestic growth all films in the ice age franchise have gathered since the first one was released in 2002. it is currently the highest grossing animated film franchise of all time if you ignore both despicable me and shrek spin-offs which puts the two close behind it and with five films in total also has more tatos under its belt than any disney or sony feature franchise and that's not counting multiple shorts and television specials which alongside the merchandise puts the franchise's overall profit to a comfortable 6 billion dollars overall not bad considering the first ice age also happened to be the first ever feature that newcomer animation studio bluesky had released however there is something off about these numbers whenever i discuss the computer animated grades of the last decade there don't seem to be any of the ice age films succeeding the first one being brought up ever it's more likely to hear someone mention any other blue sky movie like the peanuts film mario and yes part of that could also have to do with the fact that even the third ice age movie is almost 10 years behind us now but it's odd how although the last film in this franchise only came out three years ago it seems like no one ever seemed to care about these movies in recent history when i tried discussing what my friends favorite in the franchise was a lot of them hadn't even seen any of them but why is that because they're bad that they're very very bad granny we can work this out is this about the bikini ow and by that i am not referring to the first ice age movie or even the second or third those could very well be regarded as decent family films that made use of a very unique setting where prehistoric animals you don't ever get to see in any other former children's media outside of maybe the flintstones or the occasional time travel episode the first one was sort of groundbreaking and its portrayal of these creatures and wasn't entirely historically accurate certainly more than you would expect from one of the first major cg animated kids films it was even nominated for an oscar at the time something that none of the other ones have to show for themselves and compared to a few of the other greats like shrek at the time which is definitely a comparison to be proud of the film managed to juggle interesting and relatable characters with a simple yet effective plot about uniting a family with their child and in the process also help a main cast final place in this icy world the character designs were unique and environments immersive it broke away from the main story when you could tell was losing steam but never ended up losing focus either the quasi-mascot's grad was a cute and marketable comic relief there was a welcome surprise whenever he was on screen and all the rest of our cast equally as interesting with an overly stern mammoth quirky yet goofy sloth and loyal yet internally torn saber-toothed tiger making for a trio that plays off each other well and sees each of them finding their place in this world and helping each other overcome their respective fears it ultimately ended up being a film that can truly be considered fun for the whole family that knew exactly what i wanted to do with a fixed beginning and end and never overstayed its welcome so logically bluesky realized they had to do the exact opposite of everything i just said for the sequels to do even better but this wasn't a sudden process ice age 2 took place a few years after the events of the first with manny and his friends being faced with a lot of similar existential issues to the first film like being led to believe you're someone you're not by the people closest to you fear of being left alone being scared for your own future and so on in many ways this was still a relatively grounded film that yes sometimes had a few tonal issues but more or less effectively advanced upon the original's idea of a herd representing a family you get to choose further dealt with the main character manny's trauma he had to experience as a child where his herd was killed by hunters the sequel sees him finding that family he was searching on for so long but also struggling with choosing between the friends he had made previous to this and the girl he falls in love with all the duration of the movie one might even argue this is a theme they would follow with each iteration of these movies the third entry sees ally manny's love interest giving birth to their daughter peaches we would see grew up to be a teenager by movie four and by movie five leave her parents to live with her husband who by the way she met in that movie and not the mall that had a crush on her in the fourth entry and also helped her stand up against the other teenage mammoths that are pressuring her into not being friends with him and also saved her from the pirates they meet one of which diego falls in love with and with whom they also help buck an adventurer we meet in the third movie protect the pumpkin he adopts as a baby from evil vulture raptors they were living beneath the earth with all the other dinosaurs in the ice age we meet during the third film sid also adopts three of these dinos with his dino wife who we never see again because by the fifth film he also has a girlfriend and grandma and the family who were only briefly addressed in the festival why are there so many goddamn characters and i'm not joking about this one bit these movies quickly started feeling the need to give every last character in its universe a love interest to further and further hammer in the point that nothing else matters other than not being alone for a single second of your life which as i stated earlier could be a good thing if you do it like the second film where we address how building a family is just as if not even more stressful than being by yourself when by the third film the total count of characters we focused on is ramped up from four in the first to collective 11 and a bad guy and scrat and his love interest you can tell what was starting to go wrong here fashion eddie reporting for duty every single one of these started introducing more and more characters in hopes of keeping its audience of young and impressionable kids interested for as long as possible and clearly had no idea what to even do with them by the time the second came out let's look at these plot summaries for a second shall we ice age one set during the ice age a saber-toothed tiger a sloth and a woolly mammoth find a last human infant and they try to return him to his tribe ice age ii manny sid and diego discover that the ice age is coming to an end and join everybody for a journey to higher ground on the trip they discover that manny in fact is not the last of the woolly mammoths ice age 3 when sid's attempt to adopt three dinosaur eggs gets him adopted by their real mother to an underground lost world his friends attempt to rescue him ice age 4 manny diego and sid embark upon another adventure after the continental center drift using an iceberg as a ship they encounter sea creatures and battle pirates as they explore a new world all right world again a nice h5 when scrats acorn sends an asteroid to earth the herd must find a way to stop the asteroid from hitting earth with the help of a returning friend when scratch's acorn sends an asteroid to earth scrat the most cartoony character in the first movie whose only purpose was to give comic relief causes the near destruction of the entire planet by firing an asteroid to earth gee i'm having newfound appreciation for sh2 here because i feel like i'm having a meltdown when i say they didn't know what to do with these characters i don't just mean that the plots get more and more ridiculous i mean that eventually more than half of these characters weren't even around enough to justify their existence would this franchise really be missing much of granny said that never existed even the films themselves would sometimes forget about who was even present and which ones of them as louis ali and manny's teenage daughter peach's supposed best friend doesn't even appear in the fifth film and silently got replaced with some random mammoth that just appears within the first few minutes without explanation and don't you dare think any of the tv specials ever gave an explanation for this as they were too busy showing how the easter bunny came to be or how they saved christmas riveting this wouldn't bug me nearly as much as it does if the parts these characters found themselves in would work but unfortunately it seems as though the characters mold the plot more so than the other way around making any ultimate resolution redundant and seem as though it would have led to that whether our characters were there to help or not take rudy for example rudy was introduced as the big baddie of the third movie a terrifying beast more gigantic and bloodthirsty than anything we'd ever seen before and fully willing to rip out another one of their eyes if he wanted he was taken care of an amiga 5 minutes right by the end of the movie leaving no lasting impact and only serving to write off another one that got introduced right at the end the exact same happened in the most recent entry as once again the villain served absolutely no purpose and could have been written off entirely as you know a giant asteroid hitting the year should be enough of a threat don't get me wrong here from a marketing standpoint it makes total sense to introduce more and more characters to a franchise it not only ensures it's staying fresh but also potentially would allow for interesting interaction with the ones we know even though that didn't really work out but that doesn't mean that all of them are bad i think rudy's arch enemy bug was a great addition to the cast that provided a much needed breath of fresh air with this totally carefree almost reckless attitude that thanks to his backstory also didn't make him come off as an entirely one-not adventurer type even ellie had her alright moments here and there but i'd be lying if i said the bad did not wear the good or hell even with not forgetting about two minutes after they first appear introducing more and more characters also allows for tons and tons of new awful merchandise to be dumped onto happy meals far and wide but the number one reason appears to be an excuse to dump as many a-list celebrity amateur voice actors into them as possible giving us nicki minaj mammoth drake mammoth jesse j sloth and neil de buckweasel this is real i would even argue that these people are the only reason anyone even keeps going into these films they went so hard on the family aspect barely any kid can even relate to anymore and became too wacky for most adults to enjoy and i could really only see the most basic of soccer moms finding any enjoyment in them at least in the us because while the first film did relatively well both in north america and other territories there is a definite shift to a focus on the worldwide market to be seen starting with the second this makes total sense when you consider the environment it is being set in animated features with the cast of animals already don't require any prior knowledge of any given culture and are far more easily accessible to international viewers when you also said the film in an arrow creatures that for the most part aren't even around anymore you get guaranteed mass appeal it definitely helps that any given sequence featuring scratch has only the most minimal of dialogue if any and thereby most often gets used for trailers they're also what's funniest to kids and yes adults too but it's obviously kids they've been catering to with these recent releases even though the voice cast would still really like you to think otherwise that's what ice age accomplishes the most is that the movie sort of transcends the age barrier that it doesn't underestimate its audience the dangerous thing about these franchises that go on and on for more than a decade with this one closing in on its 20th anniversary is that you would theoretically want to make it so your audience grows along with these characters ensuring a viewership through the highs and lows while also giving new viewers something to enjoy and making an introduction to the series as easy as possible a prime example for this is toy story 3 which gave long time viewers the satisfying conclusion they've been waiting for with an impact that remains unmatched and yet thanks to its success also ensures a new market for toy story 4 whether we really asked for it or not ice age keeps on introducing more and more characters it expects its audience to try and keep up with while only marginally focusing on the core cast growth with an obvious time skip taking place between entries 4 and 5 that no one ever cared to explain so by the time ice age reached part 3 the emotional impact of the characters you've grown to known love with a span of over a decade on the verge of death has been replaced by oh look there's dinos now our anthropologist told us that you can do anything you want just please don't put any dinosaurs in the movie fox and blue sky have seemingly sucked every last drop of quality out of these movies in the hopes of making a quick buck while the demand for more ice age movies seems to have never been there day one you just need to read any given imdb common on four or five approved but while these films have been rising in profit with each new entry since the second the drop from four to five was pretty substantial cutting both the us and worldwide profit in half and is easily the most disliked of them all it only marginally made more profit than the first and yet could still technically be considered a success as it more than made back its budget and if not through that definitely with the help of its merchandise so it's entirely possible we will see a sixth entry in the series and beyond but not all is lost one thing these films have always had going for them is the animation which rivals even some of dreamworks is best especially during dream sequences and the score's also always been more than seriousable i'd even say the occasional one-liner wasn't complete trash someone peggy's bug definitely made me crack up a few times in both films he was in do we actually happen to see another entry in this franchise that has been on its last lag for almost 10 years now there are still ways to fix it if only slightly just imagine a new ice age story with manny diego sid and maybe bug at the helm and the baby from the first one at their side embarking on a mission to bridge the gap between humans and animals working together on an epic quest that sees them facing off against all the animals they have encountered in the past films malali and peach peter stay at home doing i don't know somewhere dancing around the fireplace something like this would put a perfect wrap around this whole franchise capping it off the way it started with a puristic approach to a story about family and friendship and what it means to accept others for who they are and making a fool of myself aren't they it is basically inevitable at this point that should fox ever decide to bring this franchise back it's gonna look exactly like all the other most recent ones with pointless celebrity cameos and due to that way too many characters hard and cliche plots and writing that would make a ten-year-old grown this series success peaked with the fourth film which is already more than most any other animated franchise can show for itself but calling that one poorly received is already an understatement and in my opinion it should finally be time to let it go i think sid put it best at the end of ice age one when he said you know this whole ice age thing is getting old you know what i could go for global warming oh no [Music] you

Channel: Cosmo

Views: 1,855,189

Rating: 4.9008284 out of 5

Keywords: cosmodore

Id: OnG50KPlF94

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pennywise-the-dance2]

Ice age could BARELY hold up one movie, making it a franchise was a stupid decision