Ratatouille predicted to be a flop?

Jim Hill Media, Pixar are extremely worried about their next animated movie Ratatouille getting lost in the fold of this summer's big blockbuster releases. This is what an "insider" (as usual, could mean the god damn cleaner!) told them concerning their last movie Cars, which didn't quite match up to the studio's expectations... "Sure, it seems ridiculous to be complaining about the second highest grossing film of the year. But the fact of the matter is that there are 75 million NASCAR fans out there. And -- before 'Cars' opened -- we had convinced ourselves that every one of those people was going to buy a ticket to Pixar's next movie. Which is why we were really expecting that 'Cars' would rack up 'Finding Nemo' and 'The Incredibles' -sized grosses.......But when that didn't happen ... Well, the first place that we looked was at 'Cars' marketing. We started asking ourselves: 'Did we position this picture properly? Should we have gone with another poster? Or a different set of TV commericials?' You always wind up second-guessing yourself in situations like this." I think the guy really does have a point, the marketing for Cars was awful. The trailers were weak, the advertising for the film was everywhere but not once was it appealing enough to draw you into seeing it. It was over-saturated and had no bite. I mean there was a time I would go out of my way to see a Pixar movie, but I never even bothered to make the trip for Cars, which ended up being a good decision in the end because the movie sucked. Pixar are worried that Ratatouille will draw in even less of a crowd than Cars did because of the heavyweight contenders it is going up against at the Box Office. At the time of writing, the movie is set to be released on June 29th, the same day as Live Free or Die Hard and only a few days short of Transformers July 4th weekend release. Not to mention Harry Potter opening just one week later, and The Simpsons Movie soon after. Variety, quite cleverly pointed out this year that in all likelihood Cars only went on to make $244 million domestic gross during the Summer because it was unchallenged in the family friendly department for around 6 weeks. This clearly won't be in the case this year, and it's probably true that something has got to give. So the talk is that the people responsible for the marketing of Ratatouille are hard at work in coming up with new and unique ideas to advertise their next movie better. What's your thoughts guys? Is Ratatouille going to be the movie that suffers the most because of a heavy hitting blockbuster summer? Or is the panic truly for nothing? Cars was the second highest grossing movie of the year after all. source - jim hell media, variety, cinematical

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Matt Holmes is the co-founder of What Culture, formerly known as Obsessed With Film. He has been blogging about pop culture and entertainment since 2006 and has written over 10,000 articles.