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Sony’s ‘Cloudy’ outlook

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Sony Pictures hopes “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” forecasts a sunny future for its animation business.

The $100-million-budget picture, adapted from the 1978 children’s favorite storybook about a town where it snows mashed potatoes and rains fruit juice, opens today in 3,120 theaters. It’s the first major computer-animated release from Sony since the 2007 box-office flop “Surf’s Up” and signals the studio’s latest attempt to enter the lucrative market for family movies.

Seven years after launching its animation unit, Sony Pictures is still trying to find its footing in a fiercely competitive environment dominated by more established studios in family entertainment, notably Walt Disney Co.’s Pixar Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. and News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox.

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It’s a segment of the movie business in which Sony, with rare exceptions, has never been much of a player. But in recent years computer-animated movies have become gold mines for the studios because they frequently attract broad-based audiences both in the U.S. and overseas. Interest in the genre has been spurred further by the potential upside from 3-D screenings. Higher 3-D ticket prices helped deliver huge business for “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” the third installment of Fox’s movie series. It earned $667 million in overseas ticket sales, making it the third-highest-grossing film ever outside the U.S.

Although expectations for “Cloudy” are considerably more muted, the movie nonetheless “is important because [Sony] needs to establish their credibility as a force in the animation industry,” said Steve Hulett, business representative for the Animation Guild, which represents animators at Sony and other studios. “Their track record has been checkered.”

Sony’s first computer-animated effort, “Open Season,” was only moderately profitable, and the film’s 2008 sequel was released in only a few foreign markets and went directly to DVD in North America. Its second movie, “Surf’s Up,” despite a disappointing performance at the box office, nonetheless earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated film. (Studio executives said “Surf’s Up” was hurt by audience fatigue with a surfeit of movies featuring penguins that preceded it.)

Amid concerns that the division was operating too autonomously from the parent studio, Sony Pictures last year installed new management.

Bob Osher, chief operating officer with Sony’s Columbia Pictures Motion Picture Group, was tapped to head the studio’s digital production division, and Hannah Minghella, daughter of the late filmmaker Anthony Minghella, was put in charge of production for the animation unit. Osher replaced Yair Landau, who left after clashing with executives at Sony and the two former DreamWorks executives he tapped to run the division, Penny Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins. Tensions also arose between Sony’s visual-effects unit, Imageworks, and the animation division.

Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures, attributed the division’s problems to the growing pains associated with launching a new studio. “Animation is something that’s relatively new to us,” he said.

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But Lynton said the new management team was communicating more closely with him and Sony Pictures co-Chairwoman Amy Pascal. In a departure from past practice, the two attend weekly meetings with the animation executives.

“We face stiff competition from people like DreamWorks and Pixar, and in all of those instances you see the whole studio get behind the movies,” he said. “We realized that’s something we needed to do.”

Although Sony has traditionally relied upon big franchises like “Spider-Man” or star-driven movies with Will Smith and Adam Sandler to win over audiences, Lynton said animated movies like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” were an integral part of the studio’s new strategy to develop more family-oriented movies.

“It’s a growing and global business,” he said.

Ironically, through its Imageworks special-effects division, Sony had been a pioneer in cutting-edge computer animation by creating digital characters such as those in “Stuart Little.” Nonetheless, the studio has been slow to leverage its technical expertise into developing full-fledged computer-animated movies and has been overtaken by rivals releasing hits like “Shrek” from DreamWorks and Fox’s “Ice Age.”

Although “Cloudy” was in development long before the management change, the movie marks the first major release for the new team.

Pre-release audience polling indicates that “Cloudy” is expected to have a modest opening. People who have seen tracking data estimate it could earn $25 million to $30 million on its opening weekend. That would be above the $23.6-million first weekend for “Open Season” but well below a typical opening for a DreamWorks or Pixar movie.

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“Cloudy,” based on the book by Judi and Ron Barrett, has been in development for more than five years. Sony optioned the work in 2003 and assigned Paul and Gaeten Brizzi to direct and Wayne Rice to adapt the screenplay, a challenging exercise given that the book had no real characters and the most threadbare of plots. It was expanded in the movie into a story about a misfit kid who invents a machine that causes food to fall from the sky, wreaking havoc on the small town of Chewandswallow.

Dissatisfied with the initial script, the studio hired relative unknowns Phil Lord and Chris Miller to take over the writing and direction. The writers had previously worked on TV shows including MTV’s animated series “Clone High.”

“Cloudy,” which is also being released in 3-D, could get a boost from the format, though it faces significant competition next month when Disney/Pixar releases the “Toy Story” movies in 3-D for a two-week run.

Beyond “Cloudy,” Sony has three projects in pre-production but won’t be releasing any animated movie next year. Its next film, “Smurfs,” is not scheduled to be released until summer 2011. The film, a hybrid of live action and animation, is based on the Belgian cartoon characters that inspired the long-running Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon series.

Osher sees such hybrid films as one way Sony can differentiate itself from rivals. “We are tasked not only with making fully animated films but any film that has an animated character in it,” he said.

The animation unit has a number of projects in development. It has signed first-look production deals with Gotham Group -- whose founder, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, has extensive ties in the animation and literary communities -- and Fred Seibert, the veteran animator behind such TV cartoons as “Wow Wow Wubbzy.”

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In 2011, Sony will release a third installment of “Open Season” directly to video; “Hotel Transylvania,” about a group of monsters hiding out in a hotel; and “Arthur Christmas,” a Monty Pythonesque comedy and one of two movies produced with the British animation house Aardman Animations.

The second Aardman film, “The Pirates!,” is a stop-motion film from director Peter Lord set for release in 2012.

Sony signed a production deal with Aardman in 2007 after DreamWorks Animation ended its ties with the company after the box-office failure of “Flushed Away,” a costly comedy about sewer rats.

But Sony is counting on Aardman’s distinctive filmmaking style, which produced the hit “Chicken Run” and the Oscar-winning “Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” to help round out the studio’s animation offerings.

“It’s a great collaboration,” Minghella said. “They are a unique voice and incredibly talented.”

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richard.verrier@latimes.com

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