'RATATOUILLE': WHETTING AUDS' APPETITES FOR SOMETHING ORIGINAL (NYT)

By Nancy Vialatte

“Wonder takes time. You don’t rush wonder. You have to coax the audience toward you a little bit.” So says “Ratatouille” director Brad Bird in an article today in the New York Times.

With so many sequels out there, Walt Disney and Pixar are facing an uphill battle at upping recognition for the original work about a rat that wants to be a chef.

Pixar and Disney have enviable name recognition among moviegoers compared with virtually any other studio. But when an original like “Ratatouille” costs roughly $100 million to make and perhaps half that to market in the United States alone, even they cannot trust viewers to show up without a painstaking introduction.

Hence, in an effort to ramp up rat awareness, Disney has planned an unusual all-day television advertising campaign which will culminate in a 90-second spot on “American Idol,” meant to incite viewers to log onto Disney.com for a nine-and-a-half-minute clip from the film.

In effect, the studio is promoting its promotion, says the NYT.

Such bravura is necessary in this case because Disney and Pixar have once again staked their fortunes on a big-budget film that is completely original in concept and execution at a time when ticket buyers have shown a growing preference for repeat performances of known commodities like “Spider-Man,” “Shrek” and Disney’s own “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

“It takes a lot more work. The rewards can be unbelievable. But they’re clearly more difficult to market,” says Disney chairman Richard Cook.

That originality is a dying value on the blockbuster end of the movie business is no secret. In the last five years, only about 20 percent of the films with more than $200 million in domestic ticket sales were purely original in concept, rather than a sequel or an adaptation of some pre-existing material like “The Da Vinci Code.” In the 1990s, originals accounted for more than twice that share, led by “Titanic,” which took in more than $600 million at the box office after its release in 1997.

Despite the fact that a rat in the kitchen could set off a sort of ick factor, Bird says he resisted calls during production to make the lead character more human and less rodent-y. “That ‘ick’ is something in our favor. It makes the story more interesting,” Bird tells the NYT.

As “Ratatouille’s” release date nears, Disney will add gimmicks like a scratch-and-sniff book from Random House and a 10-city “Ratatouille Big Cheese Tour.”

But devotion to originality may come with a price. Each Pixar film since “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles” in 2004 and “Cars” in 2006, has done less business than the film before it.

In addition, the entertainment conglomerates that now own studios may only bring their full resources to bear on the second or third in a series of films. Next month, for instance, Disney will unveil a “massive multiplayer” online game keyed to its three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. This potentially lucrative enterprise took three years to develop, and would be far more difficult to build around a one-time success like “The Incredibles.”

The drift away from pure inventiveness is limited to the industry’s most expensive and commercial films. According to the Writers Guild of America, West, the balance between original and adapted scripts in overall feature film production has remained constant in recent years, with slightly more than half of the screenplays being original.

“It’s tragic,” the screenwriter Bob Gale said of what he sees as Hollywood’s lost inventiveness. Missing, he said, is the nonpareil thrill he experienced in creating, with Robert Zemeckis, the early drafts of “Back to the Future,” a 1985 hit provoked by his own question: Would he have liked his own father if he had known him in high school?

Still, Mr. Bird confessed that pure invention can be “scary” even for those at Pixar. The director pointed, for instance, to a moment in “Ratatouille” when he felt compelled to forgo a climactic action sequence that was demanded by conventional movie logic, but that did not fit the story he and his peers had invented. “You have to let the movie be what it wants to be,” he said.