10 Movies That Ruined Their Studios

20th Century Fox founded Fox Animation Studios in 1994, seeking to ape Disney’s success, embrace evolving technology, and cement its place in the animation sphere. Like many things that Fox does, however, its efforts were a bit disjointed and lacked Disney’s drive, ethos, or vision. Nonetheless, with Don Bluth and Gary Goldman helming its projects, it scored an early success with Anastasia, the almost offensively fictional story of Anastasia Romanov escaping the violence of the Russian Revolution.

Its second film, though, the Joss Whedon-penned Titan A.E., was not so lucky. Yes, Whedon knows his genre pictures and can pen a great script with his eyes closed, but he was used to delivering for the adult and older teen markets, not children’s animation. The resulting movie took us to a universe without Earth, where it is one man’s mission to save humanity from extinction, on a budget somewhere in the $85 million region. A lot of money for such a green studio.

Titan A.E. didn’t really work for any age bracket, and wound up taking around $37 million at the box office, plunging the studio into the red. Fox could absorb the losses, but it opted to do so without its animation division, closing down Fox Animation Studios just weeks after the film’s release.