Many Culprits in Fall of a Family Film

By BROOKS BARNES
NYT

LOS ANGELES — In the movie business, sometimes a flop is just a flop. Then there are misses so disastrous that they send signals to broad swaths of Hollywood. “Mars Needs Moms” is shaping up as the second type.

Walt Disney Studios spent an estimated $175 million to make and market “Mars Needs Moms,” which sold $6.9 million in tickets at North American theaters in its opening weekend. That grim result puts the 3-D animated adventure on track to become one of the biggest box-office bombs in movie history, on par with such washouts as “The Adventures of Pluto Nash,” “Cutthroat Island” and “The Alamo.”

“Scary” is how Chuck Viane, president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios, described the audience rejection of the film. “Was it the idea? The execution? The timing? There are a lot of excuses being floated.”

The financial impact on Disney’s studio will be severe. The company has already taken a write-down of about $100 million related to the film and the closing of ImageMovers Digital, a motion-capture animation division run by Robert Zemeckis, who helped produce “Mars Needs Moms.”

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