In your explanation for Ant Bully's disappointment, you forgot "Lack of promotion." Warner Bros did the exact same thing that they did with Iron Giant.

When I told friends the movie was out, they didn't even know.

Once again, WB goes through the trouble of having an animated movie made, and then pretends that a handful of ads that hardly anyone has seen will somehow be sufficient, as opposed to the way that they promote live action films with total saturation in ads, celebrity tours of talk shows, special events, cross promotion marketing, etc.

I saw a lot of advertising on television, some billboards, and even saw Julia Roberts on some talk show. It wasn't Disney marketing, but it was pretty good.

It will get harder and harder to differentiate one animated film from another when there are so many around these days. Not to mention when your film looks like previous ant movies.

Compared to Monster House, I didn't see a lot of ads either. Actually, I still don't see much for it so I can imagine that it's rather easy for the general audience to overlook it.

I saw more advertising for Ant Bully than I did for Monster House. I think Ant Bully looks good though...so hopefully it is not the quality of the film that is keeping viewers away.

Art

TV ads - cinema trailers - billboards and busses... seems like a reasonable campaign to me.

Half the posters and billboard ads that I've seen around Vancouver list august 11th as the release.

I saw way more ads for Barnyard. Every mall down here is plastered with cows... hanging flags, huge stickers on elevator doors, hoof prints on the floors, etc... Hardly saw anything for ant bully. There wasn't even a guess your weekend estimate post here on cg-char ;)

-George

Already we're seeing the consequences of over saturating the market. While not the best job of marketing, it was promoted well enough. It's not the best release date in an already crowded lineup, and no matter how good a movie it may be, it just looks too much like something we've seen before.