F-Zero (2009 film)

Star Fox is a 2008 computer-animated adventure comedy action film co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow, produced by Tom Cruise and Nintendo, based on the video game series of the same name, and the third film in the Nintendo Cinematic Universe (NCU). It follows Fox McCloud and the Star Fox team as they form an alliance to stop an evil threat lead by the evil Andross, a scientist who is invading the Lylat Star System. The film stars Chris Pine, Robert Downey Jr., Josh Gad, Woody Harrelson, Paul Rudd, Carl Weathers, and Andy Serkis.

Nintendo produced the film in association with DreamWorks Pictures for Paramount Pictures. Its visual effects and photorealistic performance capture were done at Autodesk Maya, Pixar's RenderMan and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Nintendo rendered the film using some of the most advanced processing capabilities available at the time. A render farm of 963 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 about four years to complete Star Fox. The film was made with a production budget of $219 million, a record-breaking sum for an animated feature at the time.

Star Fox premiered in Los Angeles on May 10, 2008. It opened in on May 23, 2008, in the United States in 3,985 theaters, and in Japan on June 7, 2008, as part of Phase One of the NCU. It was a box office success, grossing $600 million against a $219 million budget, eventually becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2008. It was followed by Star Fox 2 (2011), and Star Fox 3 (2015).

Plot
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Voice cast

 * Chris Pine as Fox McCloud (motion-capture)
 * Tom Cruise as Fox McCloud (voice)
 * Robert Downey Jr. as Falco Lombardi (motion-capture)
 * Chris Pratt as Falco Lombardi (voice)
 * Josh Gad as Slippy Toad (motion-capture)
 * David Corenswet as Slippy Toad (voice)
 * Woody Harrelson as Peppy Hare (motion-capture)
 * Vincent D'Onofrio as Peppy Hare (voice)
 * Paul Rudd as ROB (motion-capture)
 * Bill Hader as ROB (voice)
 * Carl Weathers as General Pepper (motion-capture)
 * Jeffrey Wright as General Pepper (voice)
 * Ben Mendelsohn as Leon Powalski (motion-capture)
 * Tom Burke as Leon Powalski (voice)
 * Tobey Maguire as Panther Caroso (motion-capture)
 * Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Panther Caroso (voice)
 * Tom Hanks as Andrew Oikonny
 * Justin Roiland as Andrew Oikonny (voice)
 * John Travolta as James McCloud
 * Andy Serkis as Andross

Development & writing
From early on, it had been decided that Star Fox would be filmed entirely in CGI. The original script, written by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne, was titled Conerian Wars. The screenplay was later rewritten by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. The film was co-directed by Robert Zemeckis, having worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Back to the Future Part II (1989), Back to the Future Part III (1990), and The Polar Express (2004), with Tom Cruise and Shigeru Miyamoto serving as producers. Cruise compared the original Star Fox (1993) and Star Fox 64 (1997) to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first full-length photorealistic computer-animated film. In order to keep the film in line with Zemeckis' vision as director, several script rewrites took place, most in the initial stages of production. It was reported in April 2001 that Nintendo was partnering with DreamWorks Pictures on the film, making it the first animated feature DreamWorks had worked on since Antz (1998) and Shrek (2001); Paramount Pictures was given the rights to distribute the film worldwide.

Chris Pine optioned two games in 2002 with the hopes of playing Fox McCloud. His voice actor, Cruise was selected for a perceived fit between his personality and Fox's. One of the conditions of the sale was that the resulting film not be animated. Trevorrow, however, felt that a live-action version was unfeasible, claiming that it "would look awful, and it would be impossible – it would cost $1 billion instead of $160 million." Trevorrow felt that such a version would rob the audience of the art style of the game which he felt was "so much a part of the emotion of the story". The two acquired the rights to the game the following year. In order to keep his vision a new process was created by which actors would be filmed with motion capturing equipment in a black box stage which would then be animated to make the resulting film. Pine stated that this method of working was "actually a return to a type of acting that acting in films does not allow you to do", comparing the process to performing a play in the round.

Filming
Principal photography of the motion-captures sequences began on June 11, 2004, and wrapped on May 18, 2005.

Visual effects
Star Fox was completed over a period of four-years, during which approximately 200 people put in a combined 120 years of work on it. The first 18 months of development were spent creating the in-house software SQFlesh, which plugged into the programs Autodesk Maya and RenderMan. The majority of the rest of production was spent on animation. Nintendo accumulated six Altix 4000 series servers, five SGI Prism systems, and 167 Tezro workstations for the film's production. The basic film was rendered at a custom render farm created by Square Enix in Hawaii. It housed 963 Itanium 2-1100 MHz workstations. Character movements were filmed using motion capture technology. Animator Matthew Hackett stated that while motion capture was effective for many of the scenes, in others animators still had to add movements manually. Hand and facial movements were all done manually. Some of Falco Lombardi's facial features and poses were based on Hackett. As animators did not want to use any actual photographs in the film, all backgrounds were done using matte paintings. 3,327 scenes in total needed to be filmed to animate the digital characters. The film consists of 751,964 frames, with each frame taking an average of 110 minutes to render. By the end of production, Nintendo had a total of 15 terabytes of artwork for the film.

Each character's base body model was built from more than 100,000 polygons, plus more than 300,000 for clothing alone. Fox's character model bears 40,000 furs, each of which were separately and fully animated and rendered. In creating the characters, designers had to transition between using PowerAnimator, Autodesk Maya and RenderMan.

Fox's appearance was conceived by the lead animator of the project, Roy Sato, who created several conceptual designs for Trevorrow to consider, and then used the selected design as a guide for his character model. In an interview, Sato described actively trying to make him appear as realistic as possible, making him similar to himself in as many ways as he could in the animation, including elements of his personality through facial expressions. He concluded that Fox ended up being similar to him in almost every way, with the exception that "he's a lot handsome". The model for Fox was designed to closely follow human appearance, with Trevorrow commenting in an interview "I think it's OK to look at Fox and be convinced that he's a difference between a fox and a human."

Music

 * Further information: Star Fox (soundtrack) and Music of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe

Marco Beltrami composed the original music film score "with only 17 days to render the fully-finished work". It was scored for 95 orchestral musicians and 25 choral performers, with emphasis placed on sharp brass ostinatos. Beltrami composed the brass section to exchange octaves with the strings accenting scales in between. The technique has been compared as Beltrami's "sincere effort to emulate the styles of Elliot Goldenthal and Jerry Goldsmith and roll them into one unique package."

For example, the "Tunnel Chase" scene, according to Mikeal Carson, starts "atmospherically but transforms into a kinetic adrenaline rush with powerful brass writing and ferocious percussion parts". The "Spiderbots" cue highlights ostinatos in meters such as 6/8 and 5/4 and reveals "Beltrami's trademark string writing which leads to an orchestral/choral finale." Despite modified representations of the theme throughout the movie, it is the end credits that eventually showcase the entire musical theme. Erik Aadahl and Craig Berkey were the lead sound designers.

Marketing
Paramount promoted Superman Returns at 2005 San Diego Comic-Con International. During production, a series of "video diaries" on the Internet were released at BlueTights.net, showing behind-the-scenes work being done. After 27 installments, the video diaries stopped for a while shortly before the first teaser trailer was shown at screenings of Bee Movie on November 2, 2007. The next trailer then premiered on March 15, 2008 during iCarly and in theaters with the release of Leatherheads after on April 4, 2008.

Theatrical
Star Fox was originally going to be released on December 8, 2006; however, on December 8, 2005, the date was changed to May 23, 2008. This happened because Nintendo changed the release date of Kirby from December 22, 2006 to June 8, 2007, thus pushing Star Fox to May 23, 2008.

Star Fox's world premiere was on May 10, 2008, at Los Angeles' Kodak Theatre. Earlier in the year, it had received an Academy Award nomination. A test screening of the film was shown at the Harkins Cine Capri Theater in Scottsdale, Arizona on May 1, 2008, at which a Nintendo representative was present to collect viewer feedback. Star Fox is a part of Phase One in the NCU.

Home media
Star Fox was initially released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 21, 2008 in United States, in the UK on November 18, and in Australia on November 30. The DVD release went on to become one of the best-selling animated DVD titles of all time with over 19.5 million copies being sold. This two-disc DVD release comes in widescreen (1.85:1 aspect ratio) and fullscreen (specifically reframed 1.33:1 aspect ratio digitally mastered from the original source and specially reframed by the filmmakers themselves without gutting out portions of the frame using pan and scan) versions. Star Fox was also included in the "Nintendo Cinematic Universe: Phase One - The Beginning", which was released on June 22, 2010.

Box office
In its opening weekend, Star Fox earned $60 million in 3,985 theaters in the United States, ranking number two at the box office, behind Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull. For a year, it would hold the record for having the highest opening weekend for any space film until it was surpassed by Star Trek in 2009. In the United States, the film held onto the number one spot for two weeks before being surpassed by Kung Fu Panda. On Memorial Day weekend, it grossed $64,878,725 in 3,908 theatres, an average of $16,601, and gave Tom Cruise his biggest opening weekend until the release of Top Gun: Maverick in May 2022. It was the third-biggest film opening on Memorial Day weekend, after Indiana Jones. The film remained in the Top 10 at the box office for the remainder of its first sixteen weeks. It ended its initial domestic run on October 10, 2008, taking in a total of $600 million.

Critical response
The film received generally positive reviews, with critics praising its plot, casting, performances (particularly of Cruise and Serkis), animation, special effects, humor, heart, and faithfulness to the source material. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 90% score, based on 55 reviews, with an average rating of 8.67 out of 10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Star Fox continues to heighten the bars of the NCU with an action-packed space epic that fans of the video game franchise, including newcomers, should enjoy.” On an A+ to F Scale, the film received an “A”.

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