Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

For the weekend of September 18-20, 2009, Sony Pictures Animation’s feature film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs topped the box office, pulling in just over $30 million. Indeed, according to boxofficemojo.com, the film not only trumped the overhyped Megan Fox “vehicle” Jennifer’s Body by more than $22 million, but topped even Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! by more than $20 million.* It was a good weekend for Hollywood’s box office: on the whole, films performed 14 percent better than in the same weekend last year. It was a notable achievement for Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which made more than half of its profits in its 3-D and/or IMAX versions (studios have been crossing their fingers that 3-D will pay off; for films like this, it appears to be doing so, but will it work for all films? Surely not. For an intelligent take on the perils of the new wave of 3-D film, please read Kristin Thompson’s excellent piece here. As well, for those of you keeping score at home, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (hereafter just Cloudy, lest the more tempting title-shortening strategy erroneously evoke Bill Murray’s 1979 opus) is the highest-grossing animated film to be released in September. I tell you, the statistics-geekery in the film biz rivals that of Sabermetricians. BaseBallHQ

But in many ways, the multiple videogame incarnations of Cloudy are more important to Hollywood than is the release of the film on which the game is based. This is because, for the last 15 years or so, the so-called “ancillary markets,” taken together, have reaped in far more money than the theatrical release for just about any mainstream Hollywood film you can name. There’s much, much more money these days in developing a property, copyrighting the hell out of it, and then licensing various companies to use representations from that film on videogames, bedsheets, Happy Meals™, toothbrush holders, and any other plastic piece of crap you can imagine.

Ancillaries like the PSP version of Cloudy are vital to the success of a movie, even if they are not the movie themselves. And studios have still found it essential to hype up the theatrical release of a new film, for the reason that a giant P.R. splash for the film itself has residual effects: it embeds the film in our consciousness, and effectively makes us aware of the existence of all the ancillary products. Of which this PSP version is one.

The PSP version of Cloudy is, in a word, adequate. It feels like what it is: a somewhat hastily programmed, somewhat inelegantly designed tie-in product that has been designed to maximize the profits of its cinematic mothership. Which is another way of saying that this new focus by the Hollywood studios on ancillary markets has diluted the quality – the necessity, even – of those very ancillary products. Irony abounds.

I mean, this game is fine. It’s not great; it’s not terrible. It’s for kids, as you surely already know. The movie has been marketed fairly aggressively to kids – with success: according to that boxofficemojo.com page, “Sony's exit polling indicated that 79 percent of the audience was parents and their children and 21 percent was general moviegoers 12 years old and up.” I would suggest that this videogame is aimed at precisely the same crowd. Do you fit into this crowd? Then perhaps you will like the game. Though I have not yet seen the movie, I would imagine that it is an inoffensive, adequately animated, lightly comic story with some funny – but not howlingly funny – sight gags. I bet this is your impression of the film, too. If these descriptors appeal to you, perhaps you should play this game.

Or perhaps not. There ain’t much to it. You play as Flint, the main character of the film, and the story of the game is the thinnest possible extension of the story of the film. Your mission: dispense with the giant food that has fallen from the sky onto your Small American Town. You have a small arsenal of weapons, including a giant fork and the like, but you can only use certain of them for certain tasks: the game does not encourage creative use of tools/props/weapons. Similarly, there’s really only ever one path by which Flint can travel so that he encounters the giant, semi-malicious (but not too malicious! We don’t want to scare away the kids!) comestibles, and only one order in which he can complete the tasks appointed him. As I say: it’s for kids. As I also say: it was perfunctorily designed. To quote again from boxofficemojo.com about the film: Cloudy “lacked the story elements to play in the league of Pixar or DreamWorks Animation.” Indeed. In this regard, the film has been successfully adapted for the PSP format.

All that said, this game is a pleasant enough diversion. It’s satisfying to slice up giant, quivering blobs of yellow Jell-O, and to melt through giant Popsicles. But it’s not challenging, and, again, there’s really only ever one way to handle any given obstacle. Versatile this game is not. Neither is the game especially responsive: at one point, while trying to defeat some sort of swirling spaghetti tornado, none of the allotted weapons seemed to make a lick of difference, and I just had to wait until said tornado wandered, of its own accord, into a puddle of apparently super-spicy chili; thus was it dispatched, not through any effort of my own. Rather a strange strategy, and one that served as the straw that broke my gamer’s thumbs. Once I reached that point, I lost whatever minor investment I had in the game, and turned it off for good. If you have (or if you are) an eight-year-old kid, though, betcha dollars to doughnuts (they/you)’ll enjoy this game.

*It’s worth noting, however, that, based on budget-to-return ratio, The Informant! is the clear winner here. It cost only $22 million, and made about half of that back in its first weekend. Cloudy cost about $100 million, so it made about 30% of its cost back in its first weekend. Both films will surely turn profits, but on different scales. And it’s easy to determine why the one film has a torrent of associated ancillary products (see the rest of the review) and one does not.