ntist who accidentally reduced four children to ant-size proportions. Disney also scored with one of its old-fashioned musical animations that appealed to both children and adults in 1989. Its 28th feature-length cartoon titled The Little Mermaid heralded a new generation of successful animations.In the 1990s for the most part, cinema attendance was up - mostly at multi-screen cineplex complexes throughout the country. Although the average film budget was almost $53 million by 1998, many films cost over $100 million to produce. Higher costs for film star salaries and agency fees, expensive price tags for new high-tech and digital special-effects and CGI (computer generated images), costly market research and testing, and big-budget marketing all contributed to the inflated, excessive spending in the film industry. Character development and intelligent story-telling often suffered in the process. In the early 1990s, box-office revenues had dipped considerably (the average ticket price for a film was around $5 by the end of the decade), probably due in part to the American economic recession of 1991. By the beginning of the decade, the VCR was a popular appliance in most households, and rentals of videotapes were big business. By 1997, the first DVDs (digital video discs) had emerged in stores, featuring sharper resolution pictures, better quality and durability than VHS tapes. In 1999, foretelling new methods of Internet-based marketing, Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick's low-budget, roughly-made, offbeat independent film The Blair Witch Project, a quasi-documentary about a horrifying camping trip experienced by three vanished student film-makers, reaped a greater audience (and box-office receipts) from Internet exposure. It became the most profitable film (percentage-wise) of all time, earning $140 million domestically, and having only budgeted only $30,000. But there still existed an imbalanced emphasis on the opening ...
