Is Walden in Trouble?

With its latest film, City of Ember, failing to break the top 10 in its first weekend of release, Walden Media's viability as a film studio is in question.

Ember, released by Fox Walden on a $38 million production budget, opened on 2,022 screens but only earned $3.1 million to finish 11th—just behind Fireproof, a film made by amateurs for only $500,000 but has earned almost $17 million in three weeks of release.

Worse for Ember, it earned just $1,500 per screen, placing it near the bottom of 125 wide releases this year, prompting Movie City News editor David Poland to call it "an unmitigated distribution car wreck" and predict the "inevitable" end of Fox Walden as a production company.

"The crew at Fox Walden seemed to be working without an ad budget and with a lot of energy … that didn't take," wrote Poland. "And … Jeffrey Godsick's return to Fox just days ago tells us that they knew exactly what was about to happen, that Jeffrey was taken back onto the mother ship as the studio surely agreed to do if things didn't work out, and that the end of Fox Walden as a production entity is unannounced but inevitable."

Variety recently reported that Fox has "absorbed" its Walden division.

"After launching two years ago to much fanfare," read the Variety story, "the Fox Walden marketing venture is being shuttered as a stand-alone company and will be re-absorbed as an inhouse unit of 20th Century Fox's marketing division.

"As part of the restructuring, about a dozen Fox Walden staffers will be laid off."

But David Weil, CEO of Anschutz Film Group (parent of Walden Media), says the Walden brand isn't going anywhere.

"Fox Walden has been a tremendous asset for our company and Fox has been an outstanding partner," Weil said in a Fox press release. "Moving marketing functions to inside the main Fox marketing machine—the best in the business—makes both creative and financial sense. We're very happy that it will continue to exist within Fox under Jeffrey's leadership and we intend to continue to provide 3-5 films a year."

Hit-and-miss at the box office

Walden was created seven years ago to make movies based on classic children's books, among other things. But of the 20 films they have produced so far, only six have grossed over $50 million: Holes (2003), Bridge to Terabithia (2007), Charlotte's Web (2006), Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008) and the two Chronicles of Narnia movies (2005-2008).

The rest have been either modest successes at best, given the low budgets that some of them had, or outright flops at worst—and it appears that Ember is headed for "flop" status.

Two years ago, Walden joined forces with Fox to become one of that studio's several boutique labels, and around this time last year, Variety magazine even ran an article announcing that Fox Walden was ready to challenge Disney for a share of the family-movie audience—a challenge that didn't turn out so well for Walden in the months that followed.

The recent Variety story stated, "Though Fox and Walden had high hopes for the joint venture when it was created in August 2006 to market family films produced by the two companies, there weren't enough pics to warrant a stand-alone marketing entity. In the ensuing two years, only three movies have been released under the logo: Nim's Island, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and The Seeker. Though City of Ember will unspool next week as part of the partnership, there are no films planned for release in 2009."

The Hollywood Reporter and a Fox press release seem to contradict that, saying that The Tooth Fairy—starring Dwayne Johnson and Ashley Judd—is filming and, according to IMDb, slated for release from Fox Walden in June 2009. (Interestingly, The Tooth Fairy is apparently the first film to be released under the Walden brand that did not originate with Walden itself, as it's not based on a children's book.) Fox also notes that Ramona is in development with casting under way, eyeing a 2010 release.

Meanwhile, Walden's partnership with Disney on the Narnia movies seems intact, with Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third film in the series, slated for release in May 2010. But even that's not a guaranteed blockbuster, since Prince Caspian was widely regarded as something of an underperformer this year.

Will Walden survive without Fox?

if David Poland's prediction that the "end of Fox Walden is "inevitable" is true, will Walden survive apart from Fox? Who knows.

For what it's worth, the box-office failure of City of Ember should probably also be seen in the light of what Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times has described as "the Fox bad movie streak."

"I've been keeping track of all the awful movies released by 20th Century Fox, the one studio in town that seems to actually pride itself on its ability to avoid using A-list talent and successfully market dim-bulb movies," Goldstein wrote last week. "Putting aside last spring's Horton Hears a Who, Fox has released 21 movies since the July 27 [2007] opening of The Simpsons Movie. Of those 21, none has managed to even score a mediocre 50 at Rotten Tomatoes, the Web's leading aggregator of movie reviews … Now the streak has reached 22 [with] City of Ember."

To be fair, Fox has managed to make a bit of money here and there, despite a generally agreed-upon lack of quality; the phenomenal success of last year's Alvin and the Chipmunks caught everyone by surprise, for example.

But consider this: Prince Caspian was originally going to open in December, around the same time as Alvin and the Chipmunks, but then Walden decided to put it off until the summer, to make room for The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, which was also produced by Walden, and which came out on Christmas Day. The end result? The Water Horse didn't make all that much money, and Prince Caspian's mediocre box-office performance was blamed on a crowded summer market. And Alvin and the Chipmunks had the holiday-season family-movie audience pretty much all to itself.

So Walden, by bumping its Disney movie out of the way of a non-Walden Fox movie, may have helped Fox to make more money than it expected to. But Walden itself didn't reap all that many benefits, and the movies that Walden has made for Fox since then continue to disappoint.

Adapted from a posting at Chattaway's blog, FilmChat.

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