This DreamWorks Animation Film Has Amassed Quite the Cult Following

Once DreamWorks Animation committed 100% to computer animation after 2003’s box-office bomb Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, it looked like the house that Shrek built was finally in safe financial waters. A few box office misfires like Bee Movie and Megamind still occurred, but they were nowhere near the money losers that The Road to El Dorado and Sinbad had been. From June 2008 to May 2010, DreamWorks especially was on a roll, with five consecutive movies that cracked $180+ million domestically each and three of them exceeding that fabled $200+ million North American mark.

Then came the dark times in the early-to-mid-2010s, when DreamWorks Animation experienced immense financial hardship. By 2014, huge flops like Mr. Peabody & Sherman and The Penguins of Madagascar drove the studio to extreme movies like canceling upcoming features deep into production and scrambling to find an owner. These rough times could be traced back to November 2012’s Rise of the Guardians, which (at the time) became the studio’s lowest-grossing CG-animated movie domestically aside from Flushed Away. Its box office performance heralded a grim new age for DreamWorks Animation signaling that the financial hardships of the Sinbad era were not gone after all. Ironically, despite this bleak place in the history of the Dog Man studio, Rise of the Guardians has garnered a tremendous cult following in the 12+ years since its release.

Why Did Rise of the Guardians Flop?

Opening over Thanksgiving 2012 (a holiday frame Walt Disney Animation Studios usually cornered), Rise of the Guardians entered theaters with lots of pre-release expectations. Preceded by a marketing campaign that dated back eight months to its first teaser trailer (not to mention a teaser poster released the preceding Christmas), Rise of the Guardians was once projected by Wall Street analysts to hit as high as $225 million in its domestic run alone. Those lofty ambitions never came close to being realized. This Peter Ramsey directorial effort the feature barely crawled past the $100-million mark in North America.

That was by far the lowest domestic haul for a non-Flushed Away CG DreamWorks movie. Costing $145 million to make and only taking in $306.9 million worldwide, Guardians lost $87 million for DreamWorks. Maybe the film’s darker tone (which included opening the film with a shot of teenager Jack Frost’s corpse floating in a frozen river) just alienated family audiences eager to see DreamWorks deliver more Madagascar-style projects. Perhaps the generic title didn’t help draw in audiences. Whatever the reason, Rise of the Guardians was undeniably the first of many early 2010s DreamWorks Animation flops. Equally true, though, is that Guardians has endured over time to amass a cult following.  

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Part of that fanbase has to do with the protagonist, Jack Frost (Chris Pine). Throw a stone on a platform like Tumblr, and you’ll find an endless assortment of fan fiction and drawings about Frost, usually done in a loving style. Inadvertently, the DreamWorks Animation character design team created a character seemingly hand-crafted to appeal to folks hankering a young bad-boy heartthrob. Even his default blue hoodie and tragic backstory have sustained the enduring fanbase surrounding this incarnation of Jack Frost.

Rise of the Guardians Benefited From the Holidays

Though the feature’s story is technically set around Easter, Rise of the Guardians has become associated with Christmas and other winter holidays thanks to its emphasis on Santa Claus and Jack Frost. This means it’s become an annual fixture in many households that watch Yuletide holiday fare. With those constant viewings and that close association with fond family memories, more affection for Rise of the Guardians has built up compared to other DreamWorks Animation flops like Sinbad or Turbo.

It doesn’t hurt, too, that Rise of the Guardians featured a unique action-heavy tone that helped it strike a chord with a generation of younger viewers. Those idiosyncratic qualities may have hindered it during its initial theatrical run, but they also made Rise of the Guardians stand out in the pantheon of 2010s American animation. For folks looking for something different in big-screen Western animation, Rise of the Guardians immediately stood out as not just another sassy movie full of pop culture references and nostalgic needle drops.

That underwhelming box office run may have initially doomed Rise of the Guardians to bleak news headlines, but over time, a more positive association has cultivated around the feature. Pursuing something different has inspired a distinctive fandom to surround Rise of the Guardians and help it last longer than countless other animated feature film flops.

Rise of the Guardians is now available to rent or purchase from digital retailers.