The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2008–2011
Mars Needs Moms: Disney's $150M animated flop that grossed $39M
Disney's motion-capture family film cost $150M, grossed $39M worldwide, and became the biggest financial loss of any Disney-branded film.
Walt Disney Pictures · 2011-03-11
What happened
Mars Needs Moms — Disney's motion-capture animated film directed by Simon Wells and produced by Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers Digital — cost $150 million to produce, with marketing pushing Disney's total investment past $200 million.
Released March 11, 2011, it opened to $6.9 million — one of the worst openings ever for a film in 3,000+ theaters — and closed with about $39 million worldwide. Analysts called it the biggest financial loss of any Disney-branded film, estimated at $100–144 million.
The failure closed the studio's motion-capture experiment: ImageMovers Digital was shut down, and Disney ended its partnership with Zemeckis' performance-capture house. The Hollywood Reporter called it potentially one of the biggest write-offs in modern Hollywood history — a film whose technology cost more than its audience.
Why it happened
- The technology was the budget and the liability: performance-capture animation cost $150M but looked uncanny to audiences, and the film's 'dead-eye' characters repelled the family crowd it needed.
- The source material had no reach: a 2007 novel and comic with a niche following could not carry a $200M+ investment — the property's value was a fraction of the budget.
- Zemeckis' formula had run its course: after Polar Express and Beowulf's declining returns, Disney kept funding the same technology.
The lesson
Technology is not a story: Disney spent $150M+ on motion capture audiences found uncanny, for a property nobody knew.
Sources
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