The Boss Baby Pitch Meeting — Revisited!

As the franchise continues to plan expansions, the latest episode of Screen Rant‘s own Pitch Meeting series is looking back on its previous The Boss Baby analysis. The 2017 movie served as an adaptation of the children’s picture book of the same name, centering on the titular character Ted as he infiltrated a family as their newest addition in the hopes of stopping a secret war regarding adults’ love between babies and puppies. Led by Alec Baldwin, the movie was a modest hit on release, grossing over $528 million against its $125 million production budget and garnering mixed reviews.

With nearly a decade passed since the movie first hit theaters, Screen Rant‘s Pitch Meeting series is revisiting its The Boss Baby episode. The video, as seen at the top of this article, features the original analysis in which host Ryan George humorously poked fun at the movie’s overcomplicated plot regarding Baby Corp and their company initiatives, as well as the underwhelming plot device of explaining nonsensical events away with the reveal the story is being told by an imaginative adult. George goes on to edit his original script to match the pacing of his more recent videos and tone down some of his harsher critiques.

The Boss Baby Remains An Odd Oscar Nominee

While not the worst-received movie to get nominated for the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, The Boss Baby does stand out as one of the odder choices to nearly win the award at the ceremony. 2017 may not have been rife with much other competition for the award, which ultimately went to Pixar’s Coco, there were a few other options that saw much better reviews than the Baldwin-led feature that could’ve been nominated, including Captain Underpants: The Epic First Movie and The Lego Batman Movie. Check out how The Boss Baby‘s Rotten Tomatoes scores compared to its fellow 2017 Oscar nominees:

Despite its mixed reviews, one of the bigger reasons for why The Boss Baby ultimately netted itself an Oscar nomination was its impressive box office run. The Academy looks at a movie’s general popularity and box office success as much as they do the overall quality of a feature, as evidenced by the likes of The Lego Batman Movie having only grossed about half of what Boss Baby did, despite a stellar 90% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, or Captain Underpants‘ more modest box office haul of $125.4 million in spite of its very high 87% RT score.

Between its financial success and Oscar nomination, this ultimately boosted DreamWorks’ confidence in building out The Boss Baby into a franchise. As of now, this has included two Netflix shows and the 2021 movie sequel, Family Business, which garnered generally lower reviews than its predecessor and drastically underperformed at the box office in comparison with only $146.8 million made. With a third movie having said to be in early development shortly ahead of Family Business‘ release, it will be interesting to see if DreamWorks will look to learn from the critical mistakes of prior entries.

The first Boss Baby movie is available to stream on Netflix.

Source: Pitch Meeting