Jack Skellington and Moses go head-to-skull for the family crowd at the box office this weekend as Disney re-releases the 1994 animated feature Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in stereoscopic 3-D, and Rocky Mountain Pictures introduces Promenade Pictures’ new CG movie, The Ten Commandments. Nightmare arrives in 564 theaters, a step up from its 168-screen roll out last year, while Commandments opens in 830 venues across North America.
Produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick (James and the Giant Peach, Monkeybone), The Nightmare Before Christmas tells the tale of Jack Skellington, a hero in Halloween Town who decides one year that he would like to play Santa Claus for a change. When the plan goes horribly wrong, Jack and love interest Sally must save Christmas by rescuing the real Santa from the clutches of the evil Oogie Boogie. Industrial Light & Magic converted the film to 3-D and veteran Disney producer Don Hahn (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) oversaw the project.
For this year’s presentation, Disney also made a 3-D version of Vincent, a stop-motion short Tim Burton made in 1982. Animated by Stephen Chiodo and narrated by late horror movie icon Vincent Price, Vincent is a six-minute black-and-white film about a boy named Vincent Malloy who idolizes Price and does his best to live like an Edgar Allen Poe character. The gothic comedy won the Audience Award at the 1984 Ottawa Int’l Animation Festival and helped launch Burton’s career. It will screen prior to Nightmare in select theaters.
With narration by Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley, The Ten Commandments features the voices of Christian Slater as Moses, Alfred Molina as Ramses and Oscar nominee Elliott Gould as God. The film is directed by Bill Boyce (Hermie & Friends) and John Stronach (Ben Hur, Cahoots) from a screenplay by Ed Naha (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). The pic arrives with a bit of controversy over ads running on Radio Disney. Fox News reported this week that Radio Disney execs requested that the words “Chosen By God” be removed from the spots. Promenade Pictures CEO Frank Yablans, former head of Paramount Pictures and co-founder of Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures, responded to the demands by saying ‘Who do they think gave Moses his power? Tinkerbell?’
Commandments is part of a planned series of 12 films dubbed ‘Epic Stories of the Bible’ a fully-funded brand for Promenade Pictures. Each film will be produced by Promenade along with its partners, New Zealand’s Huhu Studios and Singapore’s iVL Animation (owned by ST Electronics). Promenade will market and distribute all of the films theatrically in the U.S. while retaining worldwide rights.
