F-Zero (2009 film)

Star Fox is a 2008 computer-animated science fiction action film directed by George Miller, produced by and starring Tom Cruise, from a screenplay by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, based on the video game series of the same name, and the fourth 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 System. The film also stars the voice ensemble cast featuring Robert Downey Jr., Josh Gad, Vincent D'Onofrio, Paul Rudd, Carl Weathers, Johnny Depp, Ben Mendelsohn, Tobey Maguire, Tom Hanks, John Travolta, and Andy Serkis.

Cruise had developed a script for a Star Fox film as of autumn 1998, although it was not until 2003 that DreamWorks Pictures in association with Paramount Pictures greenlit the project. 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 $419 million, a record-breaking sum for an animated feature at the time.

Star Fox premiered at the Kodak Theatre on March 30, 2008. It opened in on April 4, 2008, in the United States in 3,858 theaters, and in Japan on April 22, 2008, as part of Level One of the NCU. It was a box office success, grossing $918 million against a $419 million budget, eventually becoming the second highest-grossing film of 2008. The rights to three films are now owned by Universal Pictures on December 10, 2009.

Plot
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Voice cast

 * Tom Cruise as Fox McCloud, the leader of the Star Fox team and the archenemy of Andross.
 * Jace Norman as Fox McCloud (child)


 * Robert Downey Jr. as Falco Lombardi (motion-capture), a former gang member-turned-weapons expert and a member of the Star Fox team.
 * Leonardo DiCaprio as Falco Lombardi (voice)
 * Josh Gad as Slippy Toad, the gifted mechanic and a member of the Star Fox team.
 * Vincent D'Onofrio as Peppy Hare, a surviving original member of the Star Fox team.
 * Paul Rudd as ROB 64, Peppy's robot servant and pilot of the Great Fox.
 * Carl Weathers as General Pepper, the general of the Cornerian Army who hires Star Fox to stop Andross.
 * Samuel L. Jackson as General Pepper (voice)


 * Bill Hader as Bill Grey, Fox's former classmate at the Cornerian Academy. He is a member of the Cornerian Army.
 * Tyrese Gibson as Gunner Francis Cornell
 * John Ratzenberger as Sgt. Todd Figg
 * Reese Witherspoon as Commander Kim Tram
 * Ashton Kutcher as Gunner Maxwell Merlin
 * Johnny Depp as Wolf O'Donnell
 * Ben Mendelsohn as Leon Powalski


 * Tobey Maguire as Panther Caroso (motion-capture)
 * Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Panther Caroso (voice)


 * Tom Hanks as Andrew Oikonny (motion-capture)
 * Justin Roiland as Andrew Oikonny (voice)


 * John Travolta as James McCloud (motion-capture), Fox's deceased father and the former leader of Star Fox who was apparently killed by Andross.
 * Jeff Bridges as James McCloud (voice)
 * Andy Serkis as Andross, A former Cornerian scientist who was banished to Venom after creating an accident that nearly wiped out all life on Corneria, including Fox's mother during his birth. In revenge, he wages war on the Lylat System.

Development & writing
In 1998, Tom Cruise wrote an early script for a Star Fox 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 Star Fox 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 Lylat Wars, 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), The Polar Express (2004), The Legend of Zelda and Monster House (both 2006), with Cruise, Paula Wagner, and Shigeru Miyamoto serving as producers.

In October 2003, the film was produced at Cruise/Wagner Productions as opposed to Paramount 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 space movies. In addition, actors Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr. and James Franco were involved in screen tests for the lead role (Downey would ultimately land the role of Falco Lombardi). Bill Hader also auditioned for the role. He would eventually win the role as Fox, Falco, and Slippy's ace pilot, Bill Grey. Cruise was cast as Fox McCloud in August 2004, having been Miller's primary choice for the role after he saw Top Gun (1986), Mission: Impossible 1 and 2, Minority Report (2002) and The Last Samurai. The studio was initially hesitant to cast someone who did not seem to fit the ranks of "adrenaline-pumping, tail-kicking titans", but Cruise managed to impress studio executives with his audition.

Nicolas Cage, Josh Brolin and Mark Hamill were considered for the role of Wolf O'Donnell, but turned down the role. Johnny Depp was cast as O'Donnell in March 2005. Cruise met with Depp while he was at a set of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006). He felt attracted at the prospect of working with Miller and the idea of making a video game based film.

Jeffrey Wright unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of Peppy Hare. Carl Weathers also auditioned for the role but he was told by Cruise that he was too old for the role and was cast as General Pepper instead. Ben Mendelsohn, Tobey Maguire, Tom Hanks and Warwick Davis also auditioned for the role of Leon Powalski, Panther Caroso, Andrew Oikonny and Pigma Dengar. Before Miller cast Vincent D'Onofrio, he had expressed his interest in casting Josh Gad as Slippy Toad. D'Onofrio and Gad decided to audition after learning Cruise had been cast, feeling the film would have a more independent feel. D'Onofrio earned the role a month before shooting in an audition in Berlin.

Andy Serkis was cast as Andross, though he learned about his casting through a Star Fox fan who had read the news of his casting at a fan website three hours before his agent contacted him to inform him that he had gotten the role. Despite Stan Lee's longtime interest in playing Andross, the filmmakers agreed that he was too old to convincingly play the part, but Lee was supportive of Serkis' casting, feeling that Serkis did better than he would have done.

Filming and visual effects
In October 2005, Nintendo signed a long-term lease agreement with Raleigh Studios to photograph their next four films—Kirby, Star Fox, Metroid, and Super Smash Bros.: The Movie—at Raleigh's Manhattan Beach, California facility.

Principal photography of the motion-captures sequences began on June 11, 2005, and wrapped on May 18, 2006. 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 Miller 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 Miller 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

The score was composed by Alan Silvestri, who was inspired by Bernard Herrmann's film music; Given the film was only completed shortly before its premiere, Silvestri wrote the score to the finished scenes, which were sent to him just as work was done on them. Instead of focusing on the science fiction elements, he made a score suitable for the film noir, including the use of female singer in the some sequences, and emotional themes, which Silvestri considered unusual for that genre. Several classical pieces, including Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished Symphony), Haydn string quartet (Op. 64, No. 1), Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique), and leitmotifs from composer Koji Kondo to incorporate themes from Star Fox 64 and Star Fox: Assault within the film's score, were implemented in the score, though Silvestri said that the choices of using classical pieces were made by the studio.

Besides composing, Silvestri conducted the score, with orchestration by John Neufeld and vocals by Deborah Dietrich. The music was released on March 27, 2008 by Varése Sarabande in CD, and re-issued by Geffen Records in mid-2014 for streaming media and download. The full score as heard in the film, was released into a 2-disc "expanded edition" in 2019, which was marketed by La-La Land Records, along with several alternate and unused tracks as bonus material.

Marketing
Paramount promoted Star Fox at San Diego Comic-Con International. During production, a series of "video diaries" on the Internet were released at the film's website, 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 January 19, 2008 during iCarly and in theaters with the release of The Spiderwick Chronicles after on February 14, 2008.

Theatrical
In February 2007, Paramount announced they would move Star Fox from its December 14, 2007, release date to May 16, 2008, but has moved back to April 4 to avoid competition with The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull as the studio felt more people would see the film during summer than winter. The film was practically finished by the end of 2007. Paramount'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 Christmas release date, Cruise acknowledged it would allow more time to perfect the visual effects.

A surprise public screening was held on March 25, 2008, 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 Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, followed by a ten-minute preview of the new Star Fox film. A few minutes into the Star Wars original trilogy, the film appeared to melt and Cruise 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 March 30, 2008. For almost two years, the town of Vulcan, Alberta had campaigned to have the film premiere there, but because it had no theater, Paramount arranged instead a lottery where 300 winning residents would be taken to a prerelease screening in Calgary. Star Fox is a part of Level One in the NCU.

Home media
Star Fox was initially released on DVD and Blu-ray on October 7, 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 (2.39:1 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: Level One - The Beginning", which included all Level One of the Nintendo Cinematic Universe films, released on May 4, 2010.

Box office
Star Fox grossed $364.1 million (42.3%) in North America and $554.8 million (56.7%) in other territories for a worldwide gross of $918.9 million, against its budget of $419 million.

North America
Star Fox was released on April 4, 2008, in the United States and Canada across 3,040 theaters. It grossed $9.9M on the first day, giving it the second largest opening gross for a video-game-based film. 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 two film for the weekend, behind 21. The opening weekend audience was 51% male, and 64% of the audience were over 25 years of age. The second weekend (April 11-13) saw a further 94 theaters added, for a total of 3,134, and finally went up to number one. Box office revenue dropped by a "respectable" 38%, taking $17.6M for a total gross of $60M in ten days. The film held onto the number one spot for three weeks before being surpassed by Iron Man. On the third 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 closed on September 23, 2008, after 179 days of release, grossing $364.1 million in the United States and Canada and $554.8 million overseas for a worldwide total of $918.9 million, becoming the third highest-grossing film of 2008.

Other territories
Star Fox was released on April 6, 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 April 13-15, 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
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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