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Monsters vs. Aliens is a 2009 American animated science fiction action comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures.[5] The film was directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman from a screenplay written by Letterman, Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky, and the writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger based on a story by Vernon and Letterman. Featuring the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, Paul Rudd, and Stephen Colbert, the film involves a group of misfit monsters hired by the United States Armed Forces to stop the invasion of an extraterrestrial villain and save the world in exchange for freedom.
| Monsters vs. Aliens | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | |
| Screenplay by |
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| Story by |
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| Produced by | Lisa Stewart |
| Starring | |
| Edited by |
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| Music by | Henry Jackman |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures[2][1] DreamWorks Animation[1] |
Release date |
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Running time | 94 minutes[3] |
| Country | United States[1] |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $175 million[4] |
| Box office | $381.7 million[4] |
It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be directly produced in a stereoscopic 3D format instead of being converted into 3D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.[6]
Originally slated for release on May 15, 2009, Monsters vs. Aliens was released on March 27, 2009, in the United States in 2D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX.[7] The film received generally positive reviews from critics and was a box office success, grossing $381 million worldwide on a $175 million budget. The film was the start to the Monsters vs. Aliens franchise, and despite not being followed by a sequel, it was followed by two television specials, Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space and Night of the Living Carrots, and a Nickelodeon television series in 2013, that all take place after the film.
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In Modesto, California, Susan Murphy is to be married to weatherman Derek Dietl. Just before the ceremony, a meteorite from a destroyed planet strikes her, and its radiation is absorbed into her body. Though she initially appears unharmed, during the ceremony, the energy causes Susan to grow fifty feet tall, accidentally destroying the church in the process. Soon, a U.S. military detachment tranquilizes and captures her. Susan awakens in a top-secret government facility that houses monsters, where she meets General W.R. Monger, the Army officer in charge of the facility, and her fellow monster inmates: Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a scientist who became a human-cockroach hybrid after an experiment gone wrong; B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), a brainless and living indestructible mass of blue goo that is a result of a food flavoring mutation; the Missing Link, a prehistoric 20,000-year-old fish-ape hybrid who was thawed from deep ice by scientists; and Insectosaurus, a massive bug mutated by nuclear radiation standing 350 feet in height that attacked Tokyo. Susan is renamed “Ginormica" by the government and is forbidden any contact with her friends and family.
Meanwhile, on a mysterious spaceship, a squid-like extraterrestrial overlord named Gallaxhar is alerted to the presence of a powerful substance known as "quantonium", and sends a gigantic robotic probe to retrieve it. The probe lands on Earth, where the President of the United States attempts to make first contact with it by playing "Axel F" on a keyboard, but the probe goes on a destructive attack, heading straight for San Francisco, despite unsuccessful attempts by the U.S. Armed Forces to destroy it. Monger convinces the President to grant the monsters their freedom if they can stop the probe. In San Francisco, the probe detects the quantonium within Ginormica's body and targets her. At the Golden Gate Bridge, the monsters manage to destroy it by using parts of the bridge itself; ergo, the government honors their deal with the monsters and sets them free.
Gallaxhar sets a course for Earth to obtain the quantonium himself while the now-free Ginormica returns home with her new friends and reunites with her family. While the monsters cause a ruckus in Ginormica's backyard with her family due to their lack of social experience, she reunites with Derek at his TV station. Derek breaks off his engagement with the latter, unwilling to be with someone who would overshadow his career. Initially heartbroken, Ginormica soon realizes that her life was better as a monster and she swears to the other monsters to never go back to her original self again. Suddenly, Ginormica is pulled into Gallaxhar's ship by a tractor beam. Insectosaurus tries to save her but is shot down by Gallaxhar and seemingly killed.
Onboard the ship, Ginormica furiously breaks free from her prison cell and chases down Gallaxhar, only to be trapped by a machine that extracts the quantonium from her body, shrinking her back to her original size. Gallaxhar then uses the extracted quantonium to create clones of himself in order to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth. Monger manages to get B.O.B, Link, and Dr. Cockroach on board the ship, where they rescue Ginormica and make their way to the main power core where Dr. Cockroach sets the ship to self-destruct to prevent the invasion. After a confrontation with Gallaxhar on the bridge, Ginormica sends a ball of stored quantonium down on herself, restoring her monstrous size and strength. After rescuing her friends, they flee the ship and are rescued by Monger and Insectosaurus, who had metamorphosed into a giant butterfly. The ship then self-destructs, killing Gallaxhar and his army.
Returning to Modesto, Ginormica, B.O.B, Dr. Cockroach, Link, and Butterflyosaurus receive a hero's welcome. Hoping to give himself a career boost, Derek tries to get back with Susan, but she rejects and humiliates him live on camera in retaliation for his selfishness. Monger then arrives to inform the monsters that a monstrous snail named "Escargantua" is slowly making its way to Paris after falling into a nuclear reactor, resulting in the heroes taking off to confront the new menace.
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- Reese Witherspoon as Susan Murphy / Ginormica, a woman from Modesto, California who is hit by a radioactive quantonium meteorite on her wedding day, causing her to change drastically and grow to a height of 49 feet 11 inches (15.21 m) and into a giantess. Her exposure to quantonium also makes her hair color change from brown to white and gives her super-strength and physical imperviousness.
- Seth Rogen as B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), an indestructible gelatinous mass created when a tomato was injected with a genetically modified ranch-flavored dessert topping. He can devour and digest almost any substance. Despite having consciousness, he literally and figuratively lacks a brain and is thus the comic relief.
- Hugh Laurie as Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a brilliant scientist who attempted to imbue himself with the resilience and abilities of a cockroach, with the side effect of his head becoming that of a human-sized cockroach.
- Will Arnett as The Missing Link (usually referred to as "Link"), a 20,000-year-old fish-ape humanoid who was found frozen and thawed out by scientists, only to escape and wreak havoc at his old lagoon habitat of Cocoa Beach, Florida.
- Rainn Wilson as Gallaxhar, an evil alien overlord intent on collecting quantonium – the substance that transformed Susan into Ginormica – to give his cloning machine enough power to generate an army of clones of himself to conquer Earth. He is served by gigantic robotic probes. He claims to have suffered several traumas in his youth (which are left mostly unintelligible to the viewer, due to him telling Ginormica his story while being repeatedly photocopied to create his clones), driving him to destroy his own homeworld, and plans to make a new one on Earth.
- Amy Poehler as Gallaxhar's computer.
- Kiefer Sutherland as General W. R. Monger, a military leader who runs a top-secret facility where monsters are kept, it is his plan to fight the invading aliens with the imprisoned monsters in exchange for their freedom. In a scene during the credits, he claims to be 90 years old, in spite of his youthful appearance.
- Stephen Colbert as President Hathaway, the impulsive and rather dimwitted president of the United States. Not wanting to be remembered as "the President in office when the world came to an end", he agrees with General Monger's "Monsters vs. Aliens" plan when the U.S. Military is unable to defeat the robot probe sent by Gallaxhar.
- Paul Rudd as Derek Dietl, a megalomaniac local weatherman and Susan's supposed fiancé. He jumps at whatever opportunity he has to boost his career, which causes him to place his job and himself before his relationship with Susan, canceling their plans to have a romantic honeymoon in Paris to land an anchorman job in Fresno, California and eventually ending their engagement.
- Jeffrey Tambor as Carl Murphy, Susan's overemotional father.
- Julie White as Wendy Murphy, Susan's loving mother.
- Renée Zellweger as Katie, a woman whose date with her boyfriend Cuthbert is interrupted by the landing of Gallaxhar's robot.
- John Krasinski as Cuthbert, Katie's boyfriend.
- Ed Helms as News Reporter
- David James Koch provided the voice for the character for the Australian release of the film.[9][10]
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The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book, Rex Havoc,[11] in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures.[12] The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for a Rex Havoc trademark.[13] In a plot synopsis revealed in 2005, Rex was to assemble a team of monsters, including Ick!, Dr. Cockroach, the 50,000 Pound Woman and Insectosaurus, to fight aliens for disrupting cable TV service.[11] In the following years, the film's story diverged away from the original Rex Havoc, with directors Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman finally creating the storyline from scratch. Letterman would also co-write the film's screenplay with husband and wife duo Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky, and screenwriting duo Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger.[14]
Production designer David James stated that the film is "a return to what made us nerds in the first place," getting classic movie monsters and relaunching them in a contemporary setting. Director Conrad Vernon added that he found it would be a great idea to take hideous monsters and give them personalities and satirize the archetypes.[15] Each of the five monsters has traits traceable to sci-fi/horror B movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, although none is a mere copy of an older character.[16] Susan, who grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall into Ginormica, was inspired by Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dr. Cockroach represents The Fly and The Curse of Frankenstein, while B.O.B. is an amalgam of slithering and slimy characters that were featured in the films, including The Blob and The Crawling Eye. Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall monster, is a nod to the 1961 Kaiju film Mothra. According to Vernon, the Missing Link has no direct inspiration. He "just represents anything prehistoric that comes back to life and terrorizes people."[16] For the San Francisco sequence, the producers researched many films and photographs for an accurate depiction of the city, and filmed animator Line Andersen, who had a similar body type to Ginormica—tall, thin, and athletic-looking—walking alongside a scale model of San Francisco, to capture better how a person not comfortable with being too big with an environment would walk around it.[15]
Ed Leonard, CTO of DreamWorks Animation, says it took approximately 45.6 million computing hours to make Monsters vs. Aliens, more than eight times as many as the original Shrek. Several hundred Hewlett-Packard xw8600 workstations were used, along with a 'render farm' of HP ProLiant blade servers with over 9,000 server processor cores, to process the animation sequence. Animators used 120 terabytes of data to complete the film. They used 6 TB for an explosion scene.[17]
Starting with Monsters vs. Aliens, all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation were produced in a stereoscopic 3D format, using Intel's InTru3D technology.[18] 2D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX versions were released.
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Marketing
To promote the 3D technology that is used in Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks ran a 3D trailer before halftime in the U.S. broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. Due to the limitations of television technology at the time, ColorCode 3-D glasses were distributed at SoBe stands at major national grocers. The Monsters, except Ginormica and Insectosaurus, also appeared in a 3D SoBe commercial airing after the trailer. Bank of America gave away vouchers that covered the cost of an upgrade to a 3D theatrical viewing of the film for its customers.[19]
Home media
Monsters vs. Aliens was released to DVD and Blu-ray in the United States and Canada on September 29, 2009, and on October 26, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The home release for both the DVD and Blu-ray format only contains the 2D version of the movie. However, the release is packaged with a new short, B.O.B.'s Big Break, which is in the anaglyphic 3D format that requires red and cyan glasses.[20] Also included are four pairs of 3D glasses.[20] On January 6, 2010, it was announced that a 3D version would be released on Blu-ray.[21] On February 24, a tentative March release date was set for the United Kingdom, where anyone who buys a Samsung 3D TV or 3D Blu-ray player will get a copy.[22] On March 8, it was reported that the 3D Blu-ray would be released in the United States, also with Samsung 3D products, on March 21.[23] As of February 2011, 9.0 million home entertainment units were sold worldwide.[24] In July 2014, the film's distribution rights were purchased by DreamWorks Animation from Paramount Pictures and transferred to 20th Century Fox; the rights are now owned by Universal Pictures following its parent company NBCUniversal's acquisition of DreamWorks Animation in 2016, and the expiration of their distribution deal with 20th Century Fox in 2017.[25]
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Box office
On its opening weekend, the film opened at number 1, grossing $59.3 million in 4,104 theaters.[26] Of that total, the film grossed an estimated $5.2 million in IMAX 3D theatres, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing IMAX 3D debut, behind Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen.[27] The film grossed $198.4 million in the United States and Canada, making it the second-highest-grossing animated movie of the year in these regions behind Up. Worldwide, it is the third highest-grossing animated film of 2009 with a total of $381.7 million behind Up and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It was the highest-grossing film worldwide in Witherspoon's career until Sing overtook it in 2017.[28]
Critical response
Based on 217 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Monsters vs. Aliens has an overall approval rating from critics of 73% and an average score of 6.5/10. The critical consensus reads: "Though it doesn't approach the depth of the best-animated films, Monsters vs. Aliens has enough humor and special effects to entertain moviegoers of all ages."[29] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating from mainstream critics, the film has received a score of 56 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, which indicates "mixed or average reviews".[30] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an A− grade, on an A+ to F scale.[31]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, writing, "I suppose kids will like this movie", though he "didn't find [it] rich with humor".[32] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "WALL-E had more charm, more soul, more everything. But there's enough merry mischief here to satisfy, even if you're way past puberty."[33]
Accolades
In 2009, the film was nominated for four Annie Awards, including Voice Acting in a Feature Production for Hugh Laurie.[34] Reese Witherspoon and Seth Rogen were both nominated for best voice actor and actress at the 2010 Kids' Choice Awards for voicing Ginormica and B.O.B,[35] but lost to Jim Carrey for Disney's A Christmas Carol.[36] Monsters vs. Aliens was also nominated for Best Animated film but lost to Pixar's Up.[36] On June 24, 2009, the film won the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film.[37]
| Award | Category | Name | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annie Awards[38] | Annie Award for Best Animated Effects in an Animated Production | Scott Cegielski | Nominated |
| Annie Award for Best Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production | Tom Owens | Won | |
| Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production | Hugh Laurie | Nominated | |
| Kids' Choice Awards[35] | Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie | Seth Rogen | Nominated |
| Reese Witherspoon | Nominated | ||
| Favorite Animated Movie | Rob Letterman Conrad Vernon |
Nominated | |
| Saturn Awards[37] | Saturn Award for Best Animated Film | Rob Letterman Conrad Vernon |
Won |
| Visual Effects Society[39] | Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture | Terran Boylan David Burgess Scott Cegielski David Weatherly |
Nominated |
| Outstanding Effects Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture | David P. Allen Amaury Aubel Scott Cegielski Alain De Hoe |
Nominated |
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Canceled sequel
In April 2011, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg commented that the studio did not have plans to produce future movie-genre parodies like Megamind (2010), Monsters vs. Aliens, and Shark Tale (2004), nor sequels to these, saying that these films "all shared an approach and tone and idea of parody, and did not travel well internationally. We don't have anything like that coming on our schedule now."[40]
Television series and specials
The film was followed by two television specials titled Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space and Night of the Living Carrots, respectively, then a television series which started airing on Nickelodeon on March 23, 2013, and was cancelled after one season due to low ratings and the network's desire to refocus on making the more "Nickish" shows.[41]
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