Let it go, let it go ... Sales of games, video and music up for second year Blighty sales of video, games and music rose 2.2 per cent to £5.66bn in 2014, with games sales alone up 7.5 per cent to £2.45bn, compared with the previous year. Sales were evenly split between physical and digital purchases, according to preliminary figures released by trade group Entertainment Retailers Association. This …
Games are up 7.5% apparently, and those are increasingly coming with inbuilt phone-home technology, or in-game purchases.
You have £20 of disposable income to spend on entertainment each week do you.
A) Spend it on drugs, and pirate music?
B) Spend it on booze, and pirate films?
C) Spend it on some football game.
Choices, choices, choices.
They'll have to spin it the other way this time....
"We closed all those nasty torrent sites you naughty boys and girls were using and that's forced people to start paying up as they should have done in the first place!"
Then the figures will plateau at some point and it's back to...
"YOU THIEVING SCUM! WE'RE COMING FOR YOU!!!"
'Disney’s Frozen video, which sold over 4 million copies, 50 per cent more than the best-selling FIFA 15 video game.'
A quick look on Amazon lists Frozen as under £10 and FIFA15 at more than £30.
So 4 million Frozen at say £10 is £40 million
2.65 million FIFA15 at say £30 is £80 million. (Figures rounded.)
Frozen may be massively out-selling FIFA but the money is going to the football game.
On the other hand Frozen is still filling cinemas and has sold more merchandise than anything else this year.
Even the moderately successful animation Cars which had passable box-office and DVD sales made many times more from lunch-boxes, pyjamas etc...
Frozen stuff filled most kids Santa sacks this year. The profits will be mind-boggling.
>Probably becuase of 'Let it Go'. Even in its own context its an uplifting, power-ballady type of thing that effectively carries the whole film.
Yeah, its great. Rejection of parental authority; transition into a dangerous, isolated loner; and hey little 8-year-old girls in the audience, you too can become a hip-swaying sex-bomb (seriously, check out the difference in the walk) with a new wardrobe and a dress with a split up to <here> in 3.5 minutes.
It depends how you define a good movie.
Disney seem to have got something right, both in the movie itself and how they're building on it. One parent I spoke to said she was pleased it didn't end with an automatic marriage. And there are the sing-along-with-Frozen shows: that is something that seems new. I can remember when this sort of thing was "On Ice"; maybe it still is, but ice skating isn't what it was in the days of Torvill and Dean.
Will the next Disney movie be as good? That's going to be hard to do. But Disney has been making good animation for over 75 years. Not every movie works this well, and I wonder how much of this one has been influenced by the successes of Studio Ghibli. There has been other competition for Disney to face up to. Maybe Frozen is the climax to a golden age of animation that will now fade.
On the other hand, the success of Frozen might revive the competition. Maybe another studio will look at the possibilities and put up more money. In that, this is all like the first Star Wars movie. There were all sorts of more-or-less clones pumped out. And that boom in cinematic sci-fi and fantasy gave us a few really big movies. Would we have had Alien or Blade Runner without the success of Star Wars?
And Frozen might be a good example for a lot of Hollywood movie making, not just animation. It has a pretty smart story to tell. It doesn't just depend on spectacle. Too often I have been left with the feeling that modern film-makers have over-dosed on adrenaline and forgotten the story.
There are other good movies out there. Frozen holds its own against them—it isn't just animation.
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