Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment is getting into the booming, competitive animation business

The L.A. Times has an interesting story up that Hollywood producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard are stepping into the animated film business in hopes of taking advantage of the booming — and increasingly competitive — market for family movies.

From the site:

Grazer and Howard’s production company Imagine Entertainment has teamed with Australian animation firm Animal Logic to develop, produce and finance six movies during the next five years, they said. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Animal Logic, based in Sydney with offices in Vancouver and Los Angeles, is best known for doing the animation for hit films including Oscar-winner “Happy Feet” and “The Lego Movie,” both of which were released by Warner Bros.

The move comes amid animation’s continued dominance at the box office. Four of the top 10 movies last year were computer animated — “Finding Dory,” “The Secret Life of Pets,” “Zootopia” and “Sing.” The grown-up mid-budget movies Imagine has built its brand around face growing difficulties at the box office.

You can red the entire story here.

News: The Perils of an All Digital Movie future

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Vulture.com has an interesting read about the future and troubles of switching to an all digital movie industry which is currently at about 90% saturation.

A quote from the article:

In one of the most famous examples of the perils of digital preservation, when the makers of Toy Story attempted to put their film out on DVD a few years after its release, they discovered that much of the original digital files of the film — as much as a fifth — had been corrupted. They wound up having to use a film print for the DVD. “That was the first major episode to draw public attention to the fact that digital files are a challenge when it comes to conservation,” says Usai. (Somewhat hilariously and almost tragically, a similar fate came close to befalling Toy Story 2, which nearly got nuked when someone accidentally hit a “delete” button.)

You can read the whole article here.