“Analyst Admits to Being ‘Dead Wrong’ After Disney’s ‘Up’ Is Big Earner”

We already pounced on Wall Street here for being wrong about the market viability of Pixar’s movie Up, but now comes this:

A mea culpa, of a sort, came Wednesday from the Wall Street analyst who was the most prominent (but not the lone) prerelease naysayer about “Up,” the Disney-Pixar movie that over the weekend became the studio’s second-highest grossing film ever in North America, after “Finding Nemo.”

“Dead wrong” is how Richard Greenfield of Pali Research put his related analysis in a research note. “The recent success of Pixar’s ‘Up’ (well ahead of our forecasts) has renewed investor confidence in Disney’s creative capabilities,” he added. “Up” has so far sold $265.9 million in tickets in North America and $35.4 million overseas, where it has only begun to arrive in theaters.

It’s easy to pile on the Left Brain Members of society in a situation like this — “Damn numbers crunchers wouldn’t know a good story if it hit them square in their spreadsheet” — but honestly, did you think Up would do as well as it’s done?

Pixar has had an unbroken string of box-office successes since its “Toy Story” revolutionized animated films in 1995, but it has also drawn skepticism from analysts with its risky choices of material. In 2007, there were worries that audiences would not want to see a film about a rat in a kitchen. The next year, concerns were raised about whether audiences would sit still for a film starring two robots that had almost no dialogue for the first half-hour. But both “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E” were not only sizable successes, they each won an Oscar for best animated film.

Now go back to the post from earlier today with this quote from Pixar honcho John Lasseter:

“It takes four years to make a movie at Pixar, and 3 1/2 of those years are spend on story.”

Key word: Story.

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