Development on the film began in 2010 with Chris Columbus signing on to direct in 2013. Licensing for arcade game characters that appear in the film was obtained the following year. Filming began in Toronto on May 28, 2014, and was completed in three months. In post-production, visual effect techniques employed the use of voxels, a three-dimensional cube in 3D computer graphics, to replicate the low-resolution pixels of older arcade games on the screen.
Pixels was theatrically released in the United States on July 24, 2015, by Columbia Pictures. The film received generally negative reviews and was a commercial disappointment, grossing $244 million worldwide against a production budget of $88–129 million. It was nominated for five Razzies including Worst Picture.
At an arcade in 1982, Will Cooper watches his friend Sam Brenner seemingly lose a Donkey Kong championship game to Eddie "The Fireblaster" Plant. Videocassette footage of the event is included in a time capsule launched into space.
Will summons Sam and lieutenant colonel Violet van Patten to the White House. Seeing video footage of the attack and meeting with fellow gamer Ludlow "The Wonder Kid" Lamonsoff, Sam deduces the aliens have mistaken the videocassette as a declaration of war and are attacking Earth with arcade game icons. The aliens challenge Earth to a best-of-five battle, claiming Earth has already lost the first match. The next attack is on the Taj Mahal in the form of Arkanoid, but Sam and Will cannot persuade people and Earth loses the second match.
Sam and Ludlow train Navy SEALs to play the games while Violet develops effective energy weapons. The team heads to London, where the aliens attack Hyde Park in the form of Centipede. As the soldiers are losing, Sam and Ludlow step in and win with their gaming skills. The aliens send a trophy in the form of the Duck Hunt dog.
Eddie is freed from prison to assist in New York City, where the team fights in Mini Coopers as ghosts against a giant Pac-Man. Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani tries to reason with Pac-Man but gets his hand bitten off. Sam tricks Pac-Man and wins the game with Q*Bert as a trophy, before the aliens announce there was cheating in the game meaning Earth forfeits the challenge. Violet's son Matty discovers that Eddie used a cheat code written on the inside of his glasses, and that he had cheated in the same way in the Donkey Kong match as a child. Eddie flees and the aliens abduct Matty.
The aliens attack Washington, D.C. with an army of video game characters. One attacks Ludlow in the form of Lady Lisa, a character on whom he has a crush. Ludlow persuades her to side with him. A repentant Eddie returns to the fight. Sam, Violet, and Will are summoned to the alien mothership for a last chance to save Earth by facing their leader as Donkey Kong. The trio is placed on the starting level with Donkey Kong and the captives at the top level. Sam sees that the pattern of barrels and fireballs is random and loses hope, until Matty reveals Eddie's cheating. Realizing that he is the world's best Donkey Kong player, Sam's spirit is restored and he defeats Donkey Kong. Lisa and the aliens leave Earth.
The team is hailed as heroes and Will negotiates a peace agreement with the aliens. Eddie apologizes to Sam for cheating and acknowledges him as the best Donkey Kong player. Ludlow is devastated that Lisa is gone, so Q*Bert transforms its likeness to Lisa. Sam and Violet start a romantic relationship while Eddie meets Serena Williams and Martha Stewart. The aliens restore everything on Earth, including Iwatani's hand. A year later, Lisa and Ludlow have married and had Q*Bert children.
Michelle Monaghan as Lieutenant Colonel Violet van Patten, a unique weapons developer and specialist for the military and a member of the Arcaders.[8]
Peter Dinklage as Eddie "The Fireblaster" Plant, Brenner's former rival and a member of the Arcaders.[9] The character was partially inspired by Billy Mitchell,[10] a real-world arcade champion who became well-known in the 1980s and 1990s for setting scoring records in Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and was later accused of cheating.[11]
Andrew Bambridge as young Eddie
Josh Gad as Ludlow "The Wonder Kid" Lamonsoff, a conspiracy-theory-obsessed genius with poor social skills and a member of the Arcaders.[7]
Jacob Shinder as young Ludlow
Brian Cox as Admiral James Porter, a military heavyweight.[12]
The film is based on Patrick Jean's video-game-themed short film, Pixels.[18] In 2010, Adam Sandler hired Tim Herlihy to write the script,[19] a draft that Herlihy had said that everybody at the studio "hated". Eventually Herlihy and Sandler came up with the concept of having Kevin James be the President of the United States and rewrote the film incorporating this element.[20] In July 2012, Tim Dowling was hired to rewrite the film. Seth Gordon was attached as executive producer and as a possible candidate direct the film.[21]Chris Columbus became involved in the project in May 2013.[22] Columbus said he first met Sandler to discuss a possible remake of Hello Ghost, and as he left the meeting, the director was handed a script for Pixels. The script affected Columbus, who considered it "one of the most original ideas I had seen since the Amblin days" and a good opportunity to harken back to the 1980s comedies he worked on.[23] Characters from classic arcade games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, Galaga, and Donkey Kong, among several others, were licensed for use in the film.[24]
There were originally plans to include a scene where the Great Wall of China is damaged, but the concept was removed from the script in hopes to improve the film's chances in the Chinese market.[25]
On February 26, 2014, it was announced that Sandler would play the lead role in the film, while James and Josh Gad were in early talks to join the cast.[7] On March 28, Peter Dinklage was also in final talks to join the film, playing the fourth and final male lead.[9]Jennifer Aniston was originally considered for the female lead, but declined due to scheduling conflicts.[26] On April 4, Michelle Monaghan joined the film to star as the female lead.[8] On June 11, Brian Cox joined the cast and plays military heavyweight Admiral Porter.[12] The part of "Lady Lisa", a beautiful warrior from the fictional 1980s video game Dojo Quest, was offered to Elisha Cuthbert, but she turned down the role,[27] which went to Ashley Benson.[14] On July 9, Jane Krakowski joined the cast as the First Lady.[13]
The film was greenlit on a production budget of $135 million, which Doug Belgrad negotiated down to $110 million.[28] On March 25, 2014, the Ontario Media Development Corporation confirmed that the film would be shot in Toronto from May 28 to September 9 at Pinewood Toronto Studios.[29][30]
Principal photography on the film commenced in Toronto on June 2, 2014, using downtown streets decorated to resemble New York City.[31] Given sequences such as the Pac-Man chase happened at night, often the filmmakers would close the streets off from traffic at 7 PM and redecorate them to resemble New York until it was dark enough, filming from 9:30 PM up to 5:30 AM.[32] On July 29, filming was taking place outside of Markham, Ontario.[33] Filming was also done in the Rouge Park area, and extras were dressing in costume at Markham's Rouge Valley Mennonite Church.[33] On August 4, actors Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, and Ashley Benson were spotted in Toronto filming scenes for the film on Bay Street, which was transformed into a city block in Washington, D.C., and littered with wrecked vehicles and giant holes in the pavement.[34] The Ontario Government Buildings was doubled to transform into a federal office building in Washington. Actors were aiming at aliens, which could not be seen, but were added later with computer-generated imagery.[34] On August 26, 2014, filming took place in Cobourg.[35] Filming was completed in three months, with 12 hours of shooting a day.[36]
Most of the visual effects for Pixels were handled by Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks, with nine other VFX companies playing supporting roles, all under the leadership of supervisor Matthew Butler and producer Denise Davis. Early tests began in October 2013, with the majority of the effects work starting after principal photography wrapped in September 2014 and finishing by June 2015. The video game characters would be built out of boxy voxels to resemble the low resolution pixel-based arcades, while also emitting light and having raster scan defects in its animation to appear more like they came from a CRT monitor. Along with the actual sprite sheets, a major inspiration to build the 3D versions was the cabinet art, where Imageworks visual effects supervisor Daniel Kramer considered that "was the intention the game creators wanted their technology to be, but the technology couldn't live up to creating that". The most complex characters to model were Q*Bert, which interacted the most with humans and had the problem of looking round despite being built out of cubes, and Donkey Kong, whom the animators wanted to remain recognizable even in different angles.[32][37][38]
The film was originally scheduled to be released on May 15, 2015,[40][41] but on August 12, 2014, the release date was pushed to July 24, 2015.[42] In the United States and Canada, it was released in the Dolby Vision format in Dolby Cinema, the first film from Sony to be released in that format.[43]
The first trailer was released on March 19, 2015, and received 34.3 million global views in 24 hours, breaking Sony's previous record held by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (22 million views in 2014).[44] The second trailer was released on June 13, 2015.[45] Upon release of the trailer, similarities were noted between it and a "2002 episode" of the TV series Futurama.[46][47]
Columbia Pictures hired Entura International to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to websites hosting user-uploaded videos of the film.[51] The company filed DMCA takedown notices indiscriminately against several Vimeo videos containing the word "Pixels" in the title, including the 2010 award-winning short film the film is based on,[52] the official film trailer, a 2006 independently produced Cypriot film uploaded by the Independent Museum of Contemporary Art, a 2010 university work by a student of the Bucharest National University of Arts, a royalty-free stock footage clip and an independently produced project. The takedown notice sent by Entura stated that the works infringe a copyright they had the right to enforce; once the notice was made public, it was withdrawn.[53][54]
Pixels was released on Blu-ray (3D and 2D) and DVD on October 27, 2015.[55] According to The Numbers, the domestic DVD sales are $7,181,924, and the Blu-ray sales are $6,426,936.[56]
Pixels grossed $78.7 million in North America and $164.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $244.9 million.[5] Reports of the production budget of the film range from $88 million to $129 million,[4][5] with Sony Pictures officially stating the cost as $110 million. The film received tax rebates of $19 million for filming in Canada.[57] While it was still in theaters, The Hollywood Reporter labeled the film a box-office flop.[58]
In the United States and Canada, Pixels opened alongside Paper Towns, Southpaw, and The Vatican Tapes, in 3,723 theaters.[59] Its release date caused it to face competition from the holdovers Ant-Man and Minions, all of which were projected to earn around $20 million.[60][61] It made $1.5 million from its Thursday night showings at 2,776 theaters and topped the box office on its opening day, earning $9.2 million.[62][63][64] Through its opening weekend it grossed $24 million from 3,723 theaters, debuting at second place at the box office, behind Ant-Man.[65]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 18% based on 208 reviews; the average rating is 4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Much like the worst arcade games from the era that inspired it, Pixels has little replay value and is hardly worth a quarter."[66]OnMetacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 27 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[67] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.[64]
Peter TraversofRolling Stone gave the film one star out of four, calling it "a 3D metaphor for Hollywood's digital assault on our eyes and brains" and deeming it "relentless and exhausting".[68]InSalon.com, Andrew O'Hehir called the film "another lazy Adam Sandler exercise in 80s Nostalgia", as well as "an overwhelmingly sad experience" characterized by "soul-sucking emptiness".[69] The Guardian called it "casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric" and warned, "Pity the poor souls who go into the comedy blockbuster thinking they've signed up to watch The Lego Movie by way of Independence Day. They'll be disappointed".[70] Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News gave the film no stars and wrote, "Someone please retire Adam Sandler. Pixels is the last straw for this has-been...Every joke is forced, every special effect is un-special...The dipstick Pixels is about as much fun as a joystick and not even half as smart".[71] "It manages to achieve the weird effect of feeling overlong and choppy at the same time, like someone edited the film with a pair of garden shears," wrote Randy Cordova in The Arizona Republic.[72]
"Everything is wrong here," wrote Megan Garber in The Atlantic Monthly, "cinematically, creatively, maybe even morally. Because Pixels is one of those bad movies that isn't just casually bad, or shoot-the-moon bad, or too-close-to-the-sun bad, or actually kind of delightfully bad. It is tediously bad. It is bafflingly bad. It is, in its $90 million budget and 104-minute run time, wastefully bad. Its badness seems to come not from failure in the classic sense—a goal set, and unachieved—but from something much worse: laziness. Ambivalence. A certain strain of cinematic nihilism".[73] Peter Sobczynski, writing for RogerEbert.com, called the premise promising but the execution "abysmal".[74]
Conversely, Katie Walsh, reviewing for the Chicago Tribune, was more positive, saying "despite [its] unfortunate shortcomings, Pixels has its funny and fresh moments, thanks in large part to the supporting comic actors and inventive special effects".[75]
