My Little Pony Outdid The Transformers?

[Al-1701]

I was on Box Office Mojo looking at random figures.  I ran across this.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=hasbro.htm

My Little Pony the Movie made $100,000+ more than The Transformers Movie in 1986 dollars.  The narrative always seemed to be the MLP movie was the worse performer.   The more you know.

Ironically, this makes My Little Pony the Movie the highest grossing animated film backed by Hasbro.  And the movie likely to overtake is another My Little Pony movie.

[Mermaid]

Interesting! I hope the new movie is awesome! I love the old movie no matter how many animation errors! Love those witches!

[Leave a Whisper]

I was on Box Office Mojo looking at random figures.  I ran across this.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=hasbro.htm

My Little Pony the Movie made $100,000+ more than The Transformers Movie in 1986 dollars.  The narrative always seemed to be the MLP movie was the worse performer.   The more you know.

Ironically, this makes My Little Pony the Movie the highest grossing animated film backed by Hasbro.  And the movie likely to overtake is another My Little Pony movie.

Wow.

[daffodil101]

Interesting! I hope the new movie is awesome! I love the old movie no matter how many animation errors! Love those witches!

Love all those early MLP cartoons and the movie, haha we used to sing the songs all the time as kids!  We'd do the voices, love the Reeka and Draggle song   Yeah the animation errors sort of made it special in a way... it was all done by hand back in those days

[buttonso]

I can believe it.. the TF animated movie was not well received by some people, kinda traumatized some of its audience what with the mass kill-off of so many beloved characters.... I like it though. And I loved the MLP movie, re-enacting it was our favorite thing to do with our ponies when my sisters and I were small. 

[Lore-Lei]

Funniest of it all is the opening budget not even reaching half a million, while others pass way above it.

[Midnight_Dream]

Are we just talking animated films here? Because I'm pretty sure all of the live action Transformers movies have made more than any MLP movie.

[Deep Purple Crystal]

We probably are.
Just leaves me to wonder how the 2017 film will turn out. I hope the script has been severely revised or rewritten completely after those atrocious original concepts were leaked.

[frizzycat]

I actually thought that you were going to talk about this:

visitors can't see pics , please register or login


It looks like the value of pony items sold was higher than TF in 2014.

The article this is from is more about Mattel and Hasbro's acquisition of the Disney line, but it's very interesting: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-disney-princess-hasbro/

[Jorgito93]

Didn't saw the MLP movie yet, but for the tf movie it's understandable: the marketing was made around optimus's death.That's right, they advertised the movie from a tv show by showing the death of the main character of the same show...I can't understand hasbro's decisions that we made back then, and i still can't understand their decisions now.

[Al-1701]

Apparently, it started with Buzz Dixon.  He was a major writer for G.I. Joe and he wanted to show the horrors of war and have a character die.  However, being a weekend afternoon cartoon meant no humans dying.  When they greenlit the G.I. Joe movie, he did get permission to kill off Duke since they were discontinuing the Duke toys.

That got the people working on Transformers thinking.  They were discontinuing Optimus Prime, so they decided they would kill Prime off.  However, Transformers targeted a younger age demographic than G.I. Joe, so they ended up traumatizing the audience with Optimus Prime's brutal demise.

Ironically, after they delayed and demoted the G.I. Joe movie to a direct to video release in 1987, Duke would be gravely injured but end up surviving.

Btw, Dixon was also brought in to consult George Arthur Bloom on the My Little Pony movie and one of his more infmaous suggestions was for Wind Whistler and North Star to be seen by a drunken Shipwreck.

[Leave a Whisper]

Well I do remember seeing the TF movie and crying a lot. Not at theaters mind you, I would have only been three.

[Jorgito93]

Well hasbro thought that killing characters because their toys weren't on the shelves anymore was a good idea...It was not.The funny thing with optimus is that in g1 he resurrected to die again, and in the japanese continuity he resurrected a second time just to die again in the same episode.It's almost a personnality trait for him to die and resurrect.

[LadyMoondancer]

I think Transformers did worse because it had a PG rating, which may have caused the parents of younger TF fans to steer clear.  Transformers: The Movie is still a much better film IMO.  It may not have done well financially, but at least it was ambitious and had great animation.

Jorgito, I just watched that Japanese Headmasters episode last night!  It was the bad English dub where Spike is "Sparkle" and Rodimus is "Roadimus".

[Al-1701]

The Transformers Movie was where they spent the money, probably expecting it to be their big hit of the year.

The My Little Pony movie suffered from a poor budget, rushed production schedule, terrible villains, refusal to concentrate an any ponies as protagonists, vanilla script, and worst of all Baby Lickety-Split.  Tell me why Sarah Partridge had more speaking lines than Tony Randal and Danny DeVito combined and yet had a lower billing than the man who made constipation groans for the smooze.