You're watching Beyond The Trailer’s review of Home...

At this point, we all know that Dreamworks Animation needs Home to be a home run. Since

Rise of the Guardians they’ve had an overall losing streak at the box office with Turbo,

Mr Peabody and Sherman and Penguins of Madagascar. And Penguins was supposed to be a last minute

save, swapping release dates with Home at the last minute - which just shows how much

faith Dreamworks Animation has in Home. And while The Croods and How to Train Your Dragon

2 were successes for the company, Dragon 2 lost out to Disney’s Big Hero 6 both for

the Oscar...and the title of highest grossing animated movie for the year. And the Mouse

House has no problem kicking its rival animation studio when its down, torpedoing a potential

deal with Hasbro when Disney threatened to pull all its brand licenses from the toy company

should it acquire Dreamworks Animation. And Dreamworks Animation was hoping to be acquired

because they want to go private, as - well - Wall Street clearly isn’t rooting for

Jeffrey Katzenberg and his company as much as the fans are. Is it actually possible that

the first animation studio to legitimately challenge the House that Walt Built could

be the first to fold in an ever growing and ever more competitive market? And then there’s

the fact that there’s actually even more riding on Home than the future of the studio

that made it. Home features a non-white lead, voiced by music superstar Rihanna, looking

for her mother, voiced by Jennifer Lopez, in the midst of this alien invasion. Now just

a few months ago there was Annie starring Quvenzhane Wallis, which only posted lukewarm

box office numbers. Then there’s Disney’s The Princess and The Frog, one of the lowest

grossing movies to recently come out of the Mouse House. The success of The Karate Kid

back in 2010 was a huge step forward for family movies featuring different ethnicities, but

if Hollywood doesn’t produce another hit soon, will all that progress be lost? President

Obama even took time to visit Dreamworks Animation while dialogue for the film was being recorded,

although neither Rihanna or Lopez were present. Instead he met with the film’s two other

stars, The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons and, a man who needs no introduction, Steve

Martin. Or maybe to today’s kids, he does need an introduction? So there’s a lot riding

on Home! Will it save the day?! Or should we start calling

it “Oh Animation Studios”...?