Pixels (2015 Film)

''Pixels'' (marketed as ''Pixels: The Movie'') is a 2015 science fiction action comedy film directed by Chris Columbus from a screenplay by Tim Herlihy and Tim Dowling, based on a story by Herlihy. Loosely adapted from the 2010 short film ''Pixels'' by Patrick Jean (who serves as an executive producer on the film), the film stars Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Michelle Monaghan, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad and Brian Cox. In the film, an alien force misinterprets video feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war, resulting in them attacking Earth with technological recreations of icons from the games. The President of the United States promptly assembles a team of former arcade champions to lead the planet's defense.

Development on the film began in 2010, when Sandler obtained the rights to Jean's short film via his Happy Madison Productions company and began developing the script with Herlihy. In 2013, Columbus entered talks to direct the film, drawn to the nostalgic homage to 1980s arcade games like ''Pac-Man'', ''Donkey Kong'' and ''Space Invaders'', all of which were licensed for use in the film. Filming took place in Toronto for three months, which involved extensive night shoots and practical sets. Post-production, led by Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks, focused on creating voxelized 3D versions of arcade characters to integrate into the live-action scenes.

''Pixels'' was released theatrically in the United States on July 24, 2015 by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film grossed $244.9 million worldwide and received negative reviews from critics. It received five nominations at the 36th Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture.

Plot

In 1982, 13-year-old Sam Brenner and his friends Will Cooper and Ludlow "The Wonder Kid" Lamonsoff play at an arcade together before Sam participates in a video game championship, where he seemingly loses a ''Donkey Kong'' match to obnoxious player Eddie "The Fireblaster" Plant. Videocassette footage of the event is put in a time capsule that gets launched into outer space.

In the present, Sam is an electronics installer who is summoned alongside lieutenant colonel Violet van Patten to the White House where Will, now the President of the United States, shows him surveillance footage of Andersen Air Force Base being besieged and left in the form of pixelated debris. Sam discovers the attack's resemblance to the game ''Galaga'', but U.S. Navy leader James Porter warns Will of impeachment. Sam meets up with Ludlow, who claims the attack was caused by aliens who mistook footage of the time capsule tape as a declaration of war and is challenging Earth to a best-of-three battle using technological replicas of the games, claiming Earth has lost the first match. Sam and Ludlow tell Will of a coordinated aim at North India, but Will dismisses their concerns. The aliens attack the Taj Mahal as ''Arkanoid'' and Earth loses the second match.

Sam and Ludlow train Navy SEALs to play the games while Violet develops effective energy weapons. The team, calling themselves the "Arcaders", heads to London, where the aliens attack Hyde Park as ''Centipede'' before being defeated by Sam and Ludlow.

Will, Ludlow and a reluctant Sam recruit an imprisoned Eddie to assist in New York City, where the Arcaders battle a giant Pac-Man in Mini Coopers colored like the ghosts. Tōru Iwatani tries to console his creation only to get his hand bitten off. Sam narrowly beats Pac-Man and wins, receiving Q*bert as a trophy. During a celebration at the White House however, the aliens announce that one of the Arcaders has cheated, meaning Earth forfeits the challenge. Violet's son Matty discovers Eddie cheated in the fight against Pac-Man using a code written on his glasses, which he also used in the 1982 ''Donkey Kong'' match. As Eddie flees and the aliens abduct Matty, Violet is dismissed from her rank.

The aliens attack Washington, D.C. with an army of video game characters. Alongside Will and a repentant Eddie, the Arcaders fight through the aliens with leftover energy weapons while Ludlow is attacked by Lady Lisa, a video game character whom he has a crush on, but he persuades her to join him. Sam, Violet and Will are summoned to the alien's mother ship for a final chance to save Earth by facing their leader as Donkey Kong. The trio is placed on the starting level, with Donkey Kong and the captives at the top level. Noticing the random pattern of barrels and fireballs, Sam loses hope until Matty reveals Eddie's cheating. Realizing he is actually the world's best ''Donkey Kong'' player, Sam regains his spirit and defeats Donkey Kong, resulting in all the arcade characters disappearing, including Lisa.

The Arcaders are hailed as heroes and Will negotiates a peace agreement with the aliens. Eddie apologizes to Sam for cheating and acknowledges him as the best ''Donkey Kong'' player. Seeing Ludlow devastated that Lisa is gone, Q*Bert cheers him up by sacrificing his existence by turning into Lisa. Sam and Violet begin a relationship, Eddie meets Serena Williams and Martha Stewart as he requested, and the aliens restore everything on Earth before they depart including Tōru Iwatani's hand.

One year later, a now-married Ludlow and Lisa and Q*bert getting to live again in the form of their children.

Cast

* Adam Sandler as Sam Brenner, a former arcade video game champion, Cooper's childhood friend, and the leader of the Arcaders.
** Anthony Ippolito as the young Sam.
* Kevin James as Will " Chewie" Cooper, the disgraced President of the United States, Brenner's childhood friend, and a member of the Arcaders.
** Jared Riley as the young Cooper.
* Michelle Monaghan as Lieutenant Colonel Violet van Patten, a unique weapons developer and specialist for the military, and a member of the Arcaders.
* Peter Dinklage as Eddie "The Fireblaster" Plant, Sam's former childhood rival and a member of the Arcaders. The character was partially inspired by Billy Mitchell, a real-world arcade champion who became well known in the 1980s and 1990s for setting scoring records in ''Pac-Man'' and ''Donkey Kong'' and was later accused of cheating.
** Andrew Bambridge as the young Eddie.
* Josh Gad as Ludlow "The Wonder Kid" Lamonsoff, a conspiracy-theory-obsessed genius with poor social skills and a member of the Arcaders.
** Jacob Shinder as the young Ludlow.
* Brian Cox as Admiral James Porter, a military heavyweight of the U.S. Navy.
* Sean Bean as Corporal Hill
* Jane Krakowski as Jane Cooper, the First Lady of the United States and Cooper's wife.
* Affion Crockett as Sergeant Dylan Cohan, a soldier present during the Guam attack.
* Ashley Benson as Lady Lisa, the glamorous protagonist of the fictional arcade game ''Dojo Quest''.
* Matt Lintz as Matty van Patten, Violet's son.
* Lainie Kazan as Mickey Lamonsoff, Ludlow's grandmother.

Denis Akiyama portrays Tōru Iwatani, the creator of the ''Pac-Man'' franchise whose hand gets bitten off by Pac-Man while attempting to console him, while the real Iwatani has a cameo role as a repairman fixing a Pac-Man arcade machine. Fiona Shaw plays the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Dan Aykroyd plays the 1982 championship M.C.

Production

Development

In 2010, it was announced that Adam Sandler has bought the film rights to French filmmaker Patrick Jean's video game-themed short film, ''Pixels'', via his Happy Madison Productions company, and hired Tim Herlihy to write the script, a draft Herlihy had said everybody at the studio "hated". Eventually, Herlihy and Sandler came up with the concept of having Kevin James star in the film as the President of the United States and incorporated this element in the script. In July 2012, Tim Dowling was hired to rewrite the script, with Seth Gordon being attached as an executive producer with Gordon being a possible candidate to direct the film.

Chris Columbus entered talks to direct the film in May 2013. Columbus explained that he first met Sandler to discuss a possible remake of the South Korean film '' Hello Ghost'', and as Columbus left the meeting, Sandler handed him the script for ''Pixels''. The script deeply affected Columbus, who considered it "one of the most original ideas I had seen since the Amblin days" and a good opportunity to harken back to the 1980s comedy films he worked on. Characters from classic arcade games such as ''Space Invaders'', ''Pac-Man'', ''Frogger'', ''Galaga'' and ''Donkey Kong'', among several others, were licensed for use in the film from video game companies like Atari, Taito, Konami, Bandai Namco Games and Nintendo. Q*bert was coincidentally already owned by Sony Pictures, as Columbia Pictures owned Gottlieb while they developed the original game.

There were originally plans to include a scene in which the Great Wall of China is attacked, but the concept was removed from the script in hopes of improving the film's chances in the Chinese market. Nintendo allowed the filmmakers to feature Mario in the film, with his ''Donkey Kong'' incarnation appearing as a cameo, though his ''Super Mario Bros.'' incarnation was to appear in a post-credits scene where an alien resembling him is revealed to have survived at the Washington Monument. Noting the filmmakers could not make the scene work, Columbus decided against producing the scene, resulting in it being excised from the final film.

Pre-production

On February 26, 2014, it was announced that Sandler would play the lead role in the film, while James and Josh Gad were in early talks to join the cast. On March 28, Peter Dinklage was in final talks to join the film, playing the fourth and final male lead. Jennifer Aniston was originally considered for the female lead, but declined due to scheduling conflicts. On April 4, Michelle Monaghan joined the film to star as the female lead instead. On June 11, Brian Cox joined the cast and plays military heavyweight Admiral Porter. The part of "Lady Lisa", the glamorous protagonist of the fictional arcade game ''Dojo Quest'', was offered to Elisha Cuthbert, but she turned down the role, which went to Ashley Benson. On July 9, Jane Krakowski joined the cast as the First Lady of the United States.

Filming

The film was greenlit on a production budget of $135 million, which Doug Belgrad negotiated down to $110 million. On March 25, 2014, the Ontario Media Development Corporation confirmed the film would be shot in Toronto from May 28 to September 9 at Pinewood Toronto Studios.

Principal photography on the film commenced in Toronto on June 2, 2014, using downtown streets decorated to resemble New York City. Given sequences such as the Pac-Man chase happened at night, and the filmmakers would often close the streets off from traffic at 7:00 PM and redecorate them to resemble New York until it was dark enough, filming overnight. On July 29, filming was done outside Markham, Ontario. Filming was also done in the Rouge Park area, and extras were dressing in costume at Markham's Rouge Valley Mennonite Church. On August 4, Gad, Dinklage and Benson were spotted in Toronto filming scenes for the film on Bay Street, which was transformed into a city block in Washington, D.C., and littered with wrecked vehicles and giant holes in the pavement. The Ontario Government Buildings was doubled to transform into a federal office building in Washington. Actors were aiming at aliens, which were added later with computer-generated imagery. On August 26, filming took place in Cobourg. Filming was completed in three months, with twelve hours of shooting each day.

Post-production

Most of the visual effects were handled by Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks with nine other VFX companies playing supporting roles, all under the leadership of supervisor Matthew Butler and producer Denise Davis. Early tests began in October 2013, with most effects work starting after principal photography wrapped in September 2014 and finishing by June 2015. Video game characters would be built out of cubic voxels to resemble the low resolution pixel-based graphics from their original games, while also emitting light and having raster scan defects in its animation to appear more like they came from a CRT monitor. Along with the actual sprite sheets, a major inspiration to integrate the film's conceptualized character designs into the third dimension was the cabinet art, which Imageworks visual effects supervisor Daniel Kramer considered "was the intention the game creators wanted their technology to be, but the technology couldn't live up to creating that". The most complex character to model was Q*bert, which interacted the most with humans and looked around despite being made out of voxels. A pivotal moment in the film is the Pac-Man chase scene, where a giant Pac-Man pursues the protagonists through the city in Mini Coopers, symbolizing the ghosts from the original game. The stereo team developed 3D models of the main characters' faces using cyber scans of the actors.

The animation team developed voxelized 3D versions of classic arcade characters, including Donkey Kong, ''Centipede'' and Pac-Man, to integrate them into live-action settings. The voxelization process involved using boxes that changed per frame to mimic the pixel-based graphics, and was particularly challenging for characters with complex movements, such as Donkey Kong. Pac-Man's animation required the voxelization to allow light emission, using an extra Mini Cooper rigged with yellow light panels and generators that was driven in Toronto. Physical props, such as barrels, were constructed for key sequences to provide actors with reference points for interaction. In the ''Donkey Kong'' set, reflections on the red stage and green screen required more digital replacements than anticipated.

Music

The film score was composed by Henry Jackman, who had previously scored Disney's ''Wreck-It Ralph'', conducted by Nick Glennie-Smith and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. In June 2015, Waka Flocka Flame released a single entitled "Game On", featuring Good Charlotte, which serves as part of the film's soundtrack. Prominent contributions to the soundtrack include Cheap Trick's " Surrender" and a rendition of Queen's "We Will Rock You" remixed by Helmut VonLichten, the latter of which is featured during the ''Donkey Kong'' scenes. Additionally, a rendition of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" is performed by Ludlow. Varèse Sarabande released the score soundtrack on July 24, 2015, the same day as the film's release.

Release

Marketing

The film's first trailer was released on March 19, 2015 and received 34.3 million global views in 24 hours, breaking Sony's previous record held by ''The Amazing Spider-Man 2'' (22 million views in 2014). The second trailer was released on June 13, 2015. Upon the trailer's release, similarities were noted between the film and a segment of the ''Futurama'' episode " Anthology of Interest II".

Sony created a real-life "Electric Dreams Factory Arcade" with many of the arcade games featured in the film for various fan conventions, such as the 2014 San Diego Comic-Con and the 2015 Wizard World Philadelphia. In Brazil, a promotional video was released on July 2, 2015, showing Adam Sandler interacting with Monica and Jimmy Five from local comic ''Monica's Gang''.

Theatrical

''Pixels'' was originally scheduled to be released on May 15, 2015, but on August 12, 2014, the release date was pushed to July 24, 2015. In the United States and Canada, it was released in the Dolby Vision format in Dolby Cinema, marking the first film from Sony to be released in that format.

Copyright takedown controversy

Columbia Pictures hired Entura International to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to websites hosting user-uploaded videos of the film. The company filed DMCA takedown notices indiscriminately against several Vimeo videos containing the word "Pixels" in the title, including the 2010 short film the film is based on, the film's official trailer, a 2006 independently-produced Cypriot film uploaded by the Independent Museum of Contemporary Art, a 2010 university work by a student of the Bucharest National University of Arts, a royalty-free stock footage clip and an independently produced project. The takedown notice sent by Entura stated that the works infringe a copyright they had the right to enforce; once the notice was made public, it was withdrawn.

Home media

''Pixels'' was released on Blu-ray (3D and 2D) and DVD on October 27, 2015, by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. This release sold $12.4 million in DVD sales and $7.4 million in Blu-ray sales.

Reception

Box office

''Pixels'' grossed $78.7 million in North America and $164.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $244.9 million. Reports of the production budget of the film range from $88 million to $129 million, with Sony officially confirming the cost to be $110 million. The film received tax rebates of $19 million for filming in Canada.

In the United States and Canada, ''Pixels'' opened alongside ''Paper Towns'', '' Southpaw'' and ''The Vatican Tapes'', and faced competition from holdovers '' Minions'' and ''Ant-Man'', both of which were projected to earn around $20 million. It made $1.5 million from its Thursday night showings at 2,776 theaters and topped the box office on its opening day, earning $9.2 million. Through its opening weekend it grossed $24 million from 3,723 theaters, debuting at second place at the box office behind ''Ant-Man''.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 18% based on 205 reviews; the average rating is 3.7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Much like the worst arcade games from the era that inspired it, ''Pixels'' has little replay value and is hardly worth a quarter." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 27 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Peter Travers of ''Rolling Stone'' gave the film one star out of four, calling it "a 3D metaphor for Hollywood's digital assault on our eyes and brains" and deeming it "relentless and exhausting". In ''Salon.com'', Andrew O'Hehir called the film "another lazy Adam Sandler exercise in 80s Nostalgia", as well as "an overwhelmingly sad experience" characterized by "soul-sucking emptiness". Nigel Smith of ''The Guardian'' called it "casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric" and said, "Pity the poor souls who go into the comedy blockbuster thinking they've signed up to watch ''The Lego Movie'' by way of ''Independence Day''. They'll be disappointed". Joe Neumaier of the ''New York Daily News'' gave the film no stars and wrote, "Someone please retire Adam Sandler. ''Pixels'' is the last straw for this has-been...Every joke is forced, every special effect is un-special...The dipstick ''Pixels'' is about as much fun as a joystick and not even half as smart". "It manages to achieve the weird effect of feeling overlong and choppy at the same time, like someone edited the film with a pair of garden shears," wrote Randy Cordova in ''The Arizona Republic''.

Marjorie Baumgarten of ''The Austin Chronicle'' said the film is "flat-footed and grows tedious after the first hour" but praised the 3D effects which "enhances the action". "Everything is wrong here," wrote Megan Garber in ''The Atlantic Monthly'', "cinematically, creatively, maybe even morally. Because ''Pixels'' is one of those bad movies that isn't just casually bad, or shoot-the-moon bad, or too-close-to-the-sun bad, or actually kind of delightfully bad. It is tediously bad." Peter Sobczynski, writing for ''RogerEbert.com'', called the premise promising but the execution "abysmal". Conversely, Katie Walsh of the ''Chicago Tribune'' was more positive, saying "despite tsunfortunate shortcomings, ''Pixels'' has its funny and fresh moments, thanks in large part to the supporting comic actors and inventive special effects".

Accolades

References

Notes

Citations

External links

*
*

{{Navboxes , list1=
{{Arkanoid
{{Centipede series
{{Donkey Kong
{{Galaxian
{{Max Headroom
{{Pac-Man series
{{Space Invaders

2015 films
2010s English-language films
2015 3D films
2010s American films
2015 science fiction action films
2010s science fiction comedy films
English-language science fiction action films
English-language science fiction comedy films
American 3D films
American crossover films
American science fiction action films
American science fiction comedy films
American self-reflexive films
American films with live action and animation
English-language Chinese films
Chinese 3D films
Chinese science fiction action films
Chinese science fiction comedy films
Films about alien invasions
Films about alien abduction
IMAX films
1492 Pictures films
Columbia Pictures films
Happy Madison Productions films
Films directed by Chris Columbus (filmmaker)
Films produced by Chris Columbus (filmmaker)
Films produced by Adam Sandler
Films produced by Allen Covert
Films produced by Michael Barnathan
Films with screenplays by Tim Herlihy
Films scored by Henry Jackman
Features based on short films
Films about video games
Films about fictional presidents of the United States
Films set in 1982
Films set in 2015
Films set in the White House
Films set in Brooklyn
Films set in Guam
Films set in London
Films set in Manhattan
Films set in Washington, D.C.
Films set in Uttar Pradesh
Films shot in Toronto
Metafictional works
Cultural depictions of Madonna
Cultural depictions of Ronald Reagan