Harrison Ford's Underrated 2020 Adventure Flop Lost Millions For Disney

What is it that makes Chris Sanders' animated movies distinct? For starters, there's their visual acuity. His feature debut, "Lilo & Stitch," which Sanders wrote and directed with Dean DeBlois, features warm and inviting watercolor backdrops to match the rich, earthy tones and incredible 3D flying sequences of Sanders and DeBlois' sophomore effort, "How to Train Your Dragon" (still one of DreamWorks Animation's highest achievements). Even the somewhat underappreciated "The Croods" (a film that Sanders co-helmed with Kirk DeMicco) brings its prehistoric setting to life with striking, vibrant hues.

Sanders also has a fondness for weirdos and outcasts who form surprising connections with one another, whether they're a peculiar, tempestuous girl befriending an alien miscreant or a scrawny, yammering Viking bonding with a feral dragon. In a larger sense, his films are about families (be they formed by blood or choice) and communities overcoming their differences to help each other survive in the face of the unkind and often threatening worlds they inhabit. It's these elements that make his movies as soulful as they are joyful (and, in their darker moments, even devastating).

Appropriately, for his first go-round in live-action, Sanders elected to adapt "The Call of the Wild." The original 1903 Jack London adventure novel certainly hits on many of the filmmaker's favorite beats, from the odd couple friendship at its core to the way it depicts nature as a force that's both awe-inspiring and frightening. It's also little wonder 20th Century Fox saw this one as a potential crowd-pleaser, going so far as to green-light it with a substantial budget in the range of $125-150 million.

Alas, even having Harrison Ford as its (human) lead wasn't enough to prevent the movie from being sabotaged by a myriad of factors at the box office.

Upon acquiring "The Call of the Wild" through the Disney-Fox deal in 2019, there was no good reason the Mouse House shouldn't have been able to turn the film into a hit. It's a movie where Harrison Ford plays an adorably crotchety 19th century frontiersman who becomes pals with a dog, for Pete's sake! Had the film reached theaters on Christmas Day 2019 as originally planned, one imagines families searching for some wholesome all-ages entertainment might've very well turned it into a leggy success at the box office.

Therein lies one of the many problems with Disney owning everything. Having already staked out that frame for "Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker" (the inferior Harrison Ford film in this scenario), the Mouse House felt no need to compete with itself by unleashing "The Call of the Wild" at the same time. (Obviously, the studio also had way more riding on the former than the latter, with Sanders' adaptation being the handiwork of another company.) Instead, it gave the movie's previous date to Blue Sky's "Spies in Disguise," a Fox acquisiton that has been postponed several times over by then. If Disney's goal was to position the animated spy flick — the one where Will Smith gets transformed into a pigeon, in case you'd forgotten — as counter-programming to the latest Star War, though, it didn't exactly work; the 'toon only brought in $172 million at the box office against a $100 million price tag.

Meanwhile, "The Call of the Wild" was shunted back a couple months to late February, a frame that's historically been something of a dumping ground. Sure enough, the film petered out with a theatrical take of $111 million, which wasn't even half of what "Lilo & Stitch" had made 18 years earlier. Naturally, the COVID-19 pandemic only hurt the movie further when theaters shut down a few weeks later, but by that point, the greater damage had already been done. In an article published on March 1, 2020, Variety reported the film was "expected to lose around $50 million" based on its performance up to that point.

To paraphrase a different Harrison Ford movie, "That's not how [success] works!"

Admittedly, the blame for "The Call of the Wild" flopping doesn't fall squarely on Mickey Mouse's shoulders. Reviews for the film were also more mixed compared to those for Sanders' animated offerings, with most critics agreeing that Ford's CGI canine co-star, Buck, has a little too much of an uncanny valley look to him. Bringing the character to life via digital animation was probably a necessary gambit given the suffering poor Buck endures over the course of his journey, but that just calls attention to the movie's central flaw: It should've simply been a fully animated feature. Indeed, as is often the case with Disney's live-action remakes of its animated classics, "The Call of the Wild" contains lots of images, tonal shifts, and even characters that feel like they would've played better in the heightened realm of animation.

Those caveats aside, "The Call of the Wild" still stands head and shoulders above most of the Mouse House's live-action retellings. Even some wobbly CGI creatures and green screen work can only detract so much from the breathtaking visuals the movie serves up as it follows Buck on his trek across the untarnished Yukon, creating a sense of majesty and danger befitting of a Jack London story. Ford should also be commended for committing to his role as a grieving would-be prospector, bringing gravitas to a character that might otherwise have come across as a stock stick-in-the-mud type. (His touching interplay with Buck is all the more impressive when you remember Ford spent the whole shoot acting opposite motion-capture maestro Terry Notary in an unsightly skin-tight suit pretending to be a dog.)

It might not rank among his greatest efforts (including the animated instant-classic that is "The Wild Robot"), but "The Call of the Wild" is proof that even lesser Chris Sanders is still good. Yeah, still good.