Frozen makes box office history

It's no secret that Disney it the jackpot with Frozen, both fan-wise and financially. The Oscar-winning animated feature has now marked another milestone becoming the highest grossing animated film worldwide.

Frozen has surpassed Pixar's Toy Story 3 with a total of $1.07 billion at the box office. That not only puts it in first in the record books, but it puts Walt Disney Animation on top of Pixar for the first time. It also marks the first animated feature released by Walt Disney Animation to reach $1 billion. The runner up, Tangled, only produced $591 million worldwide. The film also managed to become the biggest digital seller of all time and sold 3.2 million Blu-Ray/DVD copies in the first day. That is the best in over a decade.
That doesn't even include how well the soundtrack is doing. The original soundtrack, composed by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, has sold 1.6 million copies with 5 million individual tracks. The video for "Let It Go" has also reached over 160 million views on YouTube, sold over 2.6 million copies, and managed to take home the Oscar for Best Original Song.

It's a no brainer that Disney will bank on this franchise. There is an average of a 2-3 hour wait to meet Anna and Elsa at Disneyland and there are rumors of both a sequel and a Frozen ride in the Disney parks. With this movie continuing to make money, I don't think we will see the end of Frozen for quite sometime. They will push it until it reaches direct-to-DVD status.

Veronica Mars upsets Kickstarter backers with download issues

When the Kickstarter campaign started to fund a much demanded, among the fanbase, movie for the canceled TV show Veronica Mars, the backers were promised a free digital download of the film on the theatrical release date. Due to demand and some lousy download production, many fans were unable to download the movie.

A consumer download company, VHX, works with Kickstarter to give the backers their downloads and they released a lengthy statement regarding the issue. It urges the distributors to "think like fans" and is blaming the difficulties on the production for not thinking like their backers. They cite the DRM-based Ultraviolet download template for the failures claiming the technology is not versatile and prevented downloads of Veronica Mars on any and all mobile devices. If you weren't downloading on a computer you couldn't get your free download.

You can read the full statement here.


Basically, this was an oops. I never really saw the point in offering the free download because a majority of people who backed the Kickstarter are the ones who would be seeing it in theaters... but you are giving them the movie at home for free. *shrug*

Veronica Mars - First Trailer

Veronica Mars was resurrected via Kickstarter last year and the task at hand is to not only make it satisfying for those who funded it on Kickstarter, but to make it appealing to an audience that didn't. Not everyone watched the television show so this could be a tough sell to those who have no idea who Veronica Mars even is. If you are unaware, the movie revisits Veronica who is a former teen detective. In the show, Veronica went from high school through college as a teen detective under the direction of her detective father. The first couple of seasons followed less mysteries that lasted over a long arc, but as the show progressed to the third and final season, Veronica was solving new mysteries every episode. Veronica Mars lasted from 2004-2007.

I think the tricky part at hand here is what I already mentioned; there are tons of moviegoers out there who have no clue who Veronica Mars is. The show isn't available for streaming anywhere, so it's not like people will be able to catch up before the movie comes out. From what I can see in the trailer, it seems that the movie is in the same style as the show. That's nice for those of us who watched the show but it can be perceived as cheesy by the average viewer going in unaware of the previous story at all. I feel like this movie should have happened years ago or not at all. Sorry my fellow Veronica Mars fans, but I am not totally convinced.



Veronica Mars is set for release on March 14th. Returning cast members include Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, Percy Daggs III, Francis Capra, and Enrico Colantoni.

Frozen - Review

Anna, a young princess, finds herself in a race against the seasons as she ventures out from her kingdom to find her newly crowned Queen sister, Elsa, after her ice powers unintentionally freeze the kingdom in an eternal winter in Frozen.


I went into Frozen with an open mind because I generally like animated movies. Despite being 25-years old, I do enjoy a children's movies for the most part. I thought the previews looked fun and the hype over it gave me a lot of hope. However, I walked out of the theater with a pretty "meh" attitude and few laughs under my belt.
I don't know if it was just me, but I didn't find Frozen to be anything too spectacular. It wasn't nearly as good as previous Walt Disney Animation films such as Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph. It didn't even come close to Wreck-It Ralph and the previews are trying to put it on the same level as The Lion King. The animation itself was gorgeous, but the story was lacking for me. I thought the beginning was very rushed and rather confusing at first. They don't really explain what Elsa's "frozen" powers are and the events with Anna were pretty unrealistic. I feel like after having a closed kingdom for 10 years you wouldn't let your princess run freely around the kingdom without people even asking where she was or what she was doing while the soon to be crowned Queen remains locked in her bedroom. It was very weird. The story itself wasn't even emotionally moving. It was one of the only Disney movies that has not moved me to feel something. Hell, I cried during Wreck-It Ralph.
Like I said, the animation was great. The ice effects and the snow were very beautifully rendered and I would put the animation on the level of the previous films from Disney. I think the events of the movie took away from it, though. There was too much music and break into song moments. They didn't flow too well together and seemed to pop up out of nowhere at times with no real lead in.
As far as characters go, I thought a majority of the characters were enjoyable. Elsa was extremely underdeveloped, though. Anna was more of a main character with Elsa as a supporting character and I felt it should be the other way around due to the fact that Elsa was the one with the powers. The funniest character was the reindeer, Sven. Hands down the most annoying character was Olaf, the snowman. He had his funny moments but as a whole he was rather annoying and had jokes that I think were a bit ahead of the intended audience. There was a joke about being impaled and the only people chuckling were the adults. That seems to be typical of kids movies these days.
I also found the blatant similarities between Frozen and Tangled to be a bit distracting. The reindeer was very similar to the horse in Tangled, Anna and Elsa both looked a lot like Rapunzel, and Prince Hans was similar in looks and personality to Flynn Rider. Also the princess being the hero was like, yeah it's been done. I kept thinking of Tangled the whole time. 

Basically, Frozen was just alright for me. I probably could have, and should have, waited for DVD so I could just rent it. I enjoyed the last half a lot more than the first and it had too much singing. It's unfortunate this movie wasn't just a little bit longer. I think an extra 10-15min could have made a big difference. It wasn't a total loss but it wasn't as good as I was expecting it to be.