Little movie trivia. Back in 1988 when Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out a big opening was about 1,000 screens. These days it's 4,000+. The $11 million opening weekend box office these days would be considered a bomb. Of course back then they didn't have CGI so it took a team of animators a year to hand draw all the animation. Here's a TV show on the behind the scenes on how they made it, [
www.youtube.com]
I'm still wondering what effect Disney buying Fox will have on the availability of standees since Disney is "in house" having their own merchandiser do them. Even without that the number of standees seems to be down. Hard to say since I haven't been getting to do any so haven't been in the theaters to see what is there. I would always check out the other standees to see what there was. Seems like it was more and more Disney (which we didn't get to do) since they had the bigger movies that could afford standees to promote them.
I wonder how much effect Regal getting bought by the UK company that isn't as standee friendly has had. Promoters are not going to spend money on standees if they are just going to get shoved down some hallway where nobody is going to see them. Regal use to be big on standees and fill their lobbies with them. Now you have to go looking for them just to find the few they have.
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Michael Eisner, then president of The Walt Disney Company, complained Who Framed Roger Rabbit was too risqué with sexual innuendo. Eisner and Zemeckis disagreed over elements with the film, but since Zemeckis had final cut privilege, he refused to make alterations. Jeffrey Katzenberg felt it was appropriate to release the film under their Touchstone Pictures banner instead of the traditional Walt Disney banner. Who Framed Roger Rabbit opened on June 22, 1988 in America, grossing $11,226,239 in 1,045 theaters during its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $156.45 million in North America and $173.35 million internationally, coming to a worldwide total of $329.8 million. At the time of release, Roger Rabbit was the twentieth highest-grossing film of all time. The film was also the second highest grossing film of 1988, behind only Rain Man.