Yes, I do. It doesn’t seem odd to you that “Ratatouille” is the lowest-grossing Pixar movie by $20 million right after Disney cuts off the fast-food tie-ins?

Is it all completely due to the fast food? No. But you can’t come on this thread decrying how horrible McDonald’s is for advertising to kids and then try to say that having McDonald’s market “Shrek” to kids on every commercial had no effect at all.

Do you think the box-office thing can really be explained by the McD thing? Shrek 3 is the sequel to two already wildly popular, extremely kid-friendly movies. Ratatouille is a movie about a rat who wants to be a chef. Now maybe I’m weird, but when I was a kid, I had no real interest in rats (especially since they didn’t exactly make the rats much more cute & cuddly than real rats are, at first glance at least). And I had no real interest in chefs. If you had told 8-year-old me there was a movie about a rat trying to cook, I would have said “Be quiet, I’m trying to watch Sailor Moon.”

Plus, the Shrek movies have a lot of dumb gags (which, I like the Shrek movies okay though they’ve been getting worse for sure). Ratatouille… is about a rat who wants to be a chef. Dunno that I would say it’s for the attention-span-challenged.

Am I saying the McD thing had NO effect? Of course not. But hey, maybe McD wouldn’t have wanted to put a freaking rat all over its food when they’re creepy enough as it is.

It would have been the height of irony if Ratatouille, a movie about a rat who wants to become a french chef, was advertised at McD’s.

Agreed that it didn’t seem to have the nag-factor that other Disney movies had. I didn’t hear a single kid moaning about wanting to see it.

I was kind of suprised that it got made at all. Is the American media done villifying France then?

It’s hard to talk about how to deal with this sort of stuff — if I were a parent, I’d definitely limit McDonalds, but I would be afraid that my kids would just start to fetishize it.

It is hard, but I try to not treat it as a big deal. We talk a lot about things that are healthy for the body and things that are only ’sometimes treats’. We keep a lot of fruit, cheese, whole wheat crackers, etc., on hand for snacks, if we have sweets around, usually it’s homemade, and we rarely get fast food.

The oldest (5 years old) seems to get it and he doesn’t whine about that sort of stuff to me, but then he also knows that whining will get him exactly nowhere except sent to his room the minute we get home. But, as much as he seems to like the food, on the rare occasions he gets McD’s or other fast food, he seems just as happy about the toys with the kid’s meal as with the food itself.

Which pretty much backs up everything I’ve ever heard: give your kids as much fresh, healthy food as they’ll eat along with small amounts of regular treats and they’ll be fine.

Ironically, Disney’s new corporate policy of refusing to do McDonald’s and other fast-food tie-ins is now hurting them at the box office, because kids who weren’t relentlessly hammered with the latest “Ratatouille” toy didn’t whine to see the movie like they did with “Shrek 3.”

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the opening weekend box-office receipts:

“Ratatouille” (with no McDonald’s marketing): $47.2 million
“Shrek the Third” (with heavy McDonald’s marketing, including tie-in food and Happy Meals): $121.6 million

I think that Disney made the right moral choice by deciding not to market unhealthy fast food to kids anymore using their characters, but I wonder how long that moral stance will last when they’re faced with a huge loss of revenue like that.