‘Abominable’ Hopes To Score Big In America
By Since Blumhouse’s The Hunt won’t be opening tonight thanks to the utter insanity that is today’s political landscape, the only wide release newbie this weekend will be DreamWorks Animation and Pearl Studio’s Abominable. If I can convince the kids to see it with me tonight, I’ll try to have a review for tomorrow morning, but the film is something of a test case in a few areas.
It’s the first non-sequel DWA toon to open since Comcast purchased DreamWorks Animation from Jeffrey Katzenberg in late 2016. Yes, they successfully sold How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World to $160 million domestic and $520 million worldwide (on a $125 million budget) even during a year when “five years later” sequels are dropping like flies, but that was still a well-liked sequel to a well-liked franchise.
Abominable, set in modern-day Shanghai, is a true original. That’s noteworthy in-and-of-itself, as quite a few DreamWorks toons are adaptations of comparatively little-known children’s books, although I imagine most folks flocking to the Shrek movies, Home or The Boss Baby didn’t read the source material, and yes that’s different from an IP pitch like Trolls or Captain Underpants. Abominable is their first outright original since Turbo back in 2013.