2 Film Excess nominations:
Best Lead Actor: Will Ferrell, also for Everything Must Go (lost to Stephen Dorff for Somewhere)
Best Animation (lost to Toy Story 3)
+ Best Family Movie of the Year
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| An appropriately silly-looking poster for Tom McGrath's Megamind |
Megamind is a super-villain who has fought for the power over Metro(-)City his whole life. When he suddenly attains it, he learns that it is futile to be the super-villain of a city that has no superhero ...
Despite Megamind being an animated feature, Will Ferrell (The Producers (2005)) steals the show completely with a superbly intonated, super-humorous voice performance as the title character. Of course it doesn't hurt that he is backed up by Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, David Cross, Brad Pitt and a script that's rich on inventive fun. - The result is that Megamind is really funny! And animation-wise, it is as wildly attractive as intended, even if some of the action is obviously there simply to satisfy the need for 3D-type action.
The movie fires away at a high pace, successfully entertaining children as primarily an adventure and adults as primarily a comedy. Unfortunately for the film, it is an example of one of those cases where two major Hollywood films are released very near each other with almost suspiciously similar storylines: In this case Despicable Me, - also a film about a super-villain with an identity crisis development and helper minions simply called minions (Megamind's fishbowl helper is also called Minion), - which came out some months prior to Megamind and got to be the much more successful commercial one of the two, although they are of similar tone and fun level.
Megamind is written by Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons (Penguins of Madagascar (2014), story, both) and directed by Washingtonian filmmaker Tom McGrath (Madagascar (2005)).
Related posts:
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess
Watch the final official trailer for the film here
Cost: 130 mil. $
Box office: 321.8 mil. $
= Even-steven
[Megamind premiered October 28 (Russia) and runs 96 minutes. Robert Downey Jr. was initially intended to voice the title character, but that luckily fell through. The film opened #1 to a 46 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it stayed atop for another week before dethroning to #2 and then #3 before falling out of the top 5 in its 5th week. It grossed 148.4 mil. $ (46.1 % of the total gross) domestically. Its 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Russia with 22 mil. $ (6.8 %) and the UK with 16 mil. $ (5 %). The film did not receive a release in China, and its Japanese release was canceled due to the Fukuyama-centered earthquake and tsunami, which contributed to its lackluster result. It sold in excess of 3 mil. DVDs and Blu-rays in North America, adding 43 mil. $ to its result, making it a financial success with this taken into account. Megamind is fresh at 73 % with a 6.7 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Megamind?
