F-Zero (2009 film)

F-Zero is a 2009 computer-animated sports science fiction action film directed by George Miller and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, Tom Cruise, Neal H. Moritz, Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald from a screenplay by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. Based on the video game series of the same name, it is the fifth film in the Nintendo Cinematic Universe (NCU). In the year 2560, a fast paced motor sports known as F-Zero has taken the galaxy by storm. Underneath the exciting landscape however, notorious criminals have begun using the sport to further their goals. Now the Galactic Federation sends its best operatives to put an end to these crimes. Among them is famed bounty hunter and racer Captain Douglas Jay Falcon who will do anything to take down these gangs. The film also stars the voices and motion-capture performances of John Cena as the titular character, with Martin Short, Keone Young, Maurice LaMarche, Keri Russell, Steve Austin, Mark Hamill, Steve Schirripa, and Tom Kenny.

Tom Cruise had developed a script for a F-Zero film as of autumn 1998, although it was not until 2003 that DreamWorks Pictures in association with Universal Pictures greenlit the project. Its visual effects and photo-realistic 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 F-Zero. The film was made with a production budget of $200 million, a record-breaking sum for an animated feature at the time.

F-Zero premiered at the Kodak Theatre on May 4, 2009. It opened on May 15, 2009 in the United States in 3,858 theaters, and in Japan on June 5, 2009, as part of Phase One of the NCU. It was a box office success, grossing $998 million against a $200 million budget, eventually becoming the highest-grossing film of 2009, until it was overtaken by Avatar.

Plot
Twenty years ago in 2540, a boy witnesses his father, an F-Zero pilot lose his life in the F-Zero Grand Prix. The boy vows to avenge his father and receives combat training from an elderly master who can channel "fire" in his moves; the boy is unable to channel the "fire", so the master gives him some advice: "Fire cannot be lit by force".

In the present, the boy has grown up and taken the mantle of Captain Falcon, a highly skilled F-Zero pilot and bounty hunter; despite this, he has yet to win an F-Zero Grand Prix or channel the "fire". Samurai Goroh is an arrogant rival bounty hunter and F-Zero pilot to Captain Falcon, always ending up behind him in each Grand Prix. Falcon also remains in occasional contact with Jody Summer, the spokesperson for the Milky Way Federation who not only has not won any F-Zero Grand Prix as well but hasn't even been able to cross the finish line.

At the F-Zero Grand Prix, all races are eliminated—except Jody, Goroh, and Falcon. Falcon manages to take the lead in the last stretch, but just before he can cross the finish line, Goroh, in the desperate attempt to not come behind him again, attempt to make a mad dash, destroying Jody's White Cat and trapping Summer under a bunch of rubble. Seeing this, Falcon stops just before the finish line and goes back to help Jody, causing Goroh to win. Falcon desperately tries to knock the rubble off, but it is too strong. Then, remembering the advice of his master ("Fire cannot be lit by force"), Falcon takes him master advice and finally channel the "fire" to knock the rubble off; Falcon would later dub this the "Falcon Punch". Falcon helps Jody back into her machine, then pushes it across the finish line, thus allowing Jody to finally "cross the finish line". At the award ceremony, the angered crowd and media condemn Goroh's victory but praise Falcon's sportsmanship.

Voice cast

 * John Cena as Captain Falcon and Blood Falcon
 * Martin Short as Dr. Robert Stewart
 * Keone Young as Samurai Goroh
 * Maurice LaMarche as Pico
 * Keri Russell as Jody Summer
 * Steve Austin as Black Shadow
 * Mark Hamill as The Skull
 * Steve Schirripa as Mr. EAD
 * Tom Kenny as Mighty Gazelle

Development & writing
In 1998, Tom Cruise wrote an early script for a F-Zero film for DreamWorks Pictures while he was working on Mission: Impossible 2 at the time. Cruise presented the script to the studio, but was denied when they realized that the budget would be too large. Four years later, the studio decided to go with his script. Cruise stated:"It's the story from that script I had written way back then. They had hired me to write a F-Zero story while I was waiting to do Mission: Impossible 2 back in 1998. It was crazy, this thing I came up with. So then fast-forward to now and, like, six months ago, they found the script and called me up. 'Hey, we want to redo this franchise and we found your old script. This is where we should have gone with the series! We want to move forward.' And that's what we're doing."The original script, written by Cruise, was titled Future Racing, and was later rewritten by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio. The film was co-directed by Robert Zemeckis, having worked on Back to the Future (1985), 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 Cruise, Paula Wagner, and Shigeru Miyamoto serving as producers.

In October 2003, the film was produced at both Original Film and Cruise/Wagner Productions as opposed to Universal Pictures so that Cruise had more creative control over the film. It was originally thought that Zemeckis would direct, but on February 1, 2004, George Miller was officially signed on to direct. 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 May 2004 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).

Casting
For the titular role, the filmmakers wanted someone who was not "extraordinarily tall or handsome as Christopher Reeve", but who could have the "heart and soul" for the audience to identify with. The studio had expressed interest in actors John Travolta, Ben Stiller, Channing Tatum, Jude Law, Keanu Reeves, Wes Bentley, and Heath Ledger. Travolta had been considered by Miller for the role in 2003, while Wagner joked that Stiller "won't even be allowed to buy a ticket to see this film". Cruise and his fellow executives pursued Ledger for the role due to his past collaborations, whereas Miller met with Bentley but did not meet with Travolta or Ledger. Bentley turned down the role as he was uninterested doing racing movies. In addition, actors Matt Damon, Jake Gyllenhall, Leonardo DiCaprio and Steve Austin were involved in screen tests for the lead role (Austin would ultimately land the role of Black Shadow). Martin Short also auditioned for the role. He would eventually win the role as Dr. Stewart. John Cena was cast as Captain Falcon in August 2004, having been Miller's primary choice for the role after he saw The Marine. The studio was initially hesitant to cast someone who did not seem to fit the ranks of "adrenaline-pumping, tail-kicking titans", but Cena managed to impress studio executives with his audition.

Keri Russell was cast as Jody Summer, though she learned about her casting through a F-Zero fan who had read the news of her casting at a fan website three hours before her agent contacted her to inform her that she had gotten the role.

Jeffrey Wright unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Samurai Goroh. Before Miller cast Keone Young, he had expressed his interest in casting Steve Schirrpia as Mr. EAD. Young and Schirripa decided to audition after learning Cena had been cast, feeling the film would have a more independent feel. Young earned the role a month before shooting in an audition in Berlin.

Filming and visual effects
Principal photography of the motion-captures sequences began on June 11, 2007, and wrapped on May 18, 2008. F-Zero 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.

In October 2008, Miyamoto said that both this film and Metroid would be released in 3-D. Miller did a one-day test shooting with a 3-D rig, rather than shooting in 2-D and converting, and found it "a nightmare" due to bulky gear, calibration issues and restricted filmmaking options. Nevertheless, he said he believes 3-D is "a new challenge and it's exciting". Miller insisted that the conversion would not compromise the film's image quality, as the decision to release the film in 3-D was made early in development, and that "an unprecedented amount of time" would be devoted to the conversion process, to render all the film's visual effects in true 3-D. Post-production was finished in February 2009. To improve the quality of the indoor lighting nuances, Weta Digital and NVIDIA developed a piece of ray tracing software called PantaRay, which requires 100 to 1,000 times more computation than traditional shadow-map based solutions.

Music

 * Further information: F-Zero (soundtrack) and Music of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe

The French electronic duo Daft Punk composed the film score of F-Zero, which features over 30 tracks. The score was arranged and orchestrated by Steve Jablonsky, and leitmotifs from composer Koji Kondo to incorporate themes from the original F-Zero, F-Zero X and F-Zero GX of the Hollywood Studio Symphony at the scoring stages at Sony and Fox. A soundtrack album of the score was released by Varèse Sarabande on May 7, 2009, and sold 71,000 copies in its first week in the United States. Peaking at number six on the Billboard 200, it eventually acquired a platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America, denoting shipments of 1,000,000 copies.

Marketing
Before the film's release, Universal carried out a viral marketing campaign to promote the film which included viral tie-ins similar to I Love Bees. Filmmakers decided to create a teaser trailer that would be a surprise in the light of commonplace media saturation. Rather than edit the teaser from footage taken from the finished film, footage was captured during the preparation stages solely for creation of the teaser. Ernest Holzman, who would later be replaced with Battlestar Galactica cinematographer Stephen McNutt, utilized the Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera for the shoot. The teaser was then used as a basis for the film itself. Universal Pictures encouraged the teaser to be released without a title attached, and the Motion Picture Association of America approved the move. As Hancock showed high tracking numbers before its release on July 2, 2008, the studio attached the teaser trailer for F-Zero that showed the release date of May 15, 2009, but not the title. The next trailer then premiered on October 9, 2008 during a rerun of Drake & Josh with the full trailer debuted with Quantum of Solace on November 14, 2008. A final trailer debuted with Watchmen on March 6, 2009.

Theatrical
In January 2008, Universal announced they would move F-Zero from its July 11, 2008 release date to December 19, 2008, but has moved to May 15, 2009 due to going into post-production as the studio felt more people would see the film during summer than winter. The film was practically finished by the end of 2008. Universal's decision came about after visiting the set and watching dailies, as they realized the film could appeal to a much broader audience. Even though the filmmakers liked the summer release date, Cruise acknowledged it would allow more time to perfect the visual effects.

A surprise public screening was held on April 30, 2009, at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Austin, Texas, hosted by writers Colin Trevorrow, Adam McKay, and George Lucas. The showing was publicized as a screening of The Fast and the Furious, followed by a ten-minute preview of the new F-Zero film. A few minutes into the Fast & Furious, the film appeared to melt and Cena appeared on stage with Miller, Trevorrow, McKay, Lucas and Miyamoto, asking the audience, "wouldn't you rather see the new movie?" Following the surprise screening in Texas, the first of many premieres across the world was held at Los Angeles' Kodak Theatre, on May 4, 2009. For one year, the town of Vulcan, Alberta had campaigned to have the film premiere there, but because it had no theater, Universal arranged instead a lottery where 300 winning residents would be taken to a prerelease screening in Calgary. F-Zero is a part of Phase One in the NCU.

Home media
F-Zero was initially released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 20, 2009 in United States, in the UK on November 9, and in Australia on November 21. 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.

F-Zero was also included in the "Nintendo Cinematic Universe: Phase One - The Beginning", which included all Phase One of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe films, released on May 10, 2011.

Box office
F-Zero grossed $415.1 million (42.3%) in North America and $482.9 million (56.7%) in other territories for a worldwide gross of $998 million, against its budget of $200 million.

North America
F-Zero was released on May 15, 2009, in the United States and Canada across 3,040 theaters. It grossed $110.2 million on the first day, giving it the second largest opening gross for a video-game-based animated film following Metroid. For the opening weekend, the film took in a total of $28,302,165, an average of $9,310 per theater, making it the number one film for the weekend, ahead of Star Trek. The opening weekend audience was 51% male, and 64% of the audience were over 11 years of age. The Memorial Day weekend saw a further 94 theaters added, for a total of 3,134, giving John Cena his biggest opening weekend. Box office revenue dropped by a "respectable" 38%, taking $110.9 for a total gross of $215.1 million in ten days. On the third weekend, it grossed $64,878,725 in 3,908 theatres, an average of $16,601. It closed on April 30, 2009, after 146 days of release, grossing $415.1 million in the United States and Canada and $482.9 million overseas for a worldwide total of $998 million, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 2009, overtaking The Dark Knight.

Other territories
F-Zero was released on December 7, 2008, in the United Arab Emirates ($258,108), and on April 7 in Estonia ($24,471), Latvia ($15,750), Lebanon ($36,316) and Lithuania ($13,676), grossing $348,321 for the opening weekend and accruing a total of $855,009 in the first 17 days. On the weekend of December 12-14, the film opened in the United Kingdom ($3,386,876), Greece ($367,845), Israel ($200,372), South Africa ($193,632), Norway ($109,252) and East Africa ($7,324)

Critical response
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