Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure

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Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure
If only Ryan's parents could accept the declining popularity of their franchise, then this blatant cash-grab of a film wouldn't exist.
Genre: Comedy Superhero Animated Adventure Directed by: Albie Hecht Produced by: Shion Kaji Loann Kaji Written by: Rose Frankel Shion Kaji Based on: Ryan's World Starring: Ryan Kaji Emma Kaji Kate Kaji Loann Kaji Shion Kaji Bradley William Smith Julia Stockton Brianna Jaynes Scott Whyte Photography: Color Distributed by: Falling Forward Films Release date: April 6, 2024 (CIFF) August 16, 2024 (United States) Runtime: 80 minutes Country: United States Japan Language: English Budget: $10 million Box office: $624,429

Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure (sometimes shortened to simply Ryan's World: the Movie) is a live-action/animated superhero film based on the YouTube channel, Ryan's World, co-produced by Loann Kaji and Shion Kaji, Chris M. Williams as executive producer, directed by Albie Hecht (in his directorial debut), and written by Rose Frankel.

The film premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival on April 6, 2024, and was released in theaters across the United States on August 16, 2024. The film received negative reviews from critics and was a box-office bomb, grossing only $624,429 against its $10 million budget.

Plot

Ryan performs a magic trick with fellow YouTuber Dan Rhodes in a livestream. However, he finds out that his sisters Emma and Kate stole some magic goo he needed for the trick. After confronting his sisters for vandalizing his items, Ryan and his friend Aiden head to Dabgib Comics, where after doing a favor for Clark, the store's owner, they both get access to a secret room in the store. There, Ryan finds a comic book plagiarizing his work, which he steals. Ryan returns home, where he sees that Emma and Kate have vandalized another of his toys. He threatens to never play with his sisters ever again and storms away. Emma and Kate then notice the comic book starting to come to life, and upon opening the book, they are told by Dark Titan, who is disguised as a unicorn, to enter the comic book so they can impress Ryan. When Ryan attempts to apologize to his sisters, he finds out that they have entered the comic book, so he leaves Aiden behind and enters the comic book world to save his sisters.

Upon entering the Titan Universe, Ryan transforms into the animated superhero, Red Titan, gaining superpowers that he uses to fight off a hoard of robots, who try and capture him. However, a bat named Stella saves Ryan, and the two team up to save Emma, Kate, and the Titan Universe. Meanwhile, Emma and Kate are now held captive by Dark Titan, locked away in a dungeon with Combo Panda and Alpha Lexa, two superheroes from the Titan Universe. Ryan encounters and defeats Dark Titan, allowing everyone held captive in the dungeon to escape. Emma and Kate, who have also gained superpowers, use their telepathy to devise a plan and help out Ryan, by tricking Dark Titan into destroying his lair and getting defeated in the process. After escaping, Ryan exclaims that Emma and Kate are too young to fight the "Big Bad", the true villain of the Titan Universe, and advises them to not join him. Meanwhile, Aiden tries to prevent Shion from realizing that his children are inside the comic book.

Big Bad is planning to cause a volcanic eruption that will destroy the Titan Universe, by putting Mentos into the lava. The volcano slowly starts to erupt, becoming an obstacle for Ryan and his team. Emma and Kate, after being saved by Ryan, tell him that they're being underestimated, before everyone gets captured by Big Bad and his henchmen. At Big Bad's lair, he explains to the heroes his plot to destroy the Titan Universe, killing them in the process. Big Bad reveals that he is Clark and that he made the comic book himself to kill Ryan, as Clark's little sister, Mia, stopped playing with him in favor of watching Ryan's videos. Ryan and Big Bad then battle each other, as Aiden gets some of Ryan's toys and successfully sends them to the Titan Universe, bringing them to life and serving as backup for Ryan. After defeating Big Bad, Ryan and his sisters say goodbye to the other heroes as they leave the Titan Universe. Back in the real world, they completely hide their adventure from their parents, as they begin to have fun outside.

Why It Was a Titan of a Flop

1. The idea of making a feature-length movie based on the Ryan's World franchise is a terrible idea, considering that the YouTube channel is currently a shallow and cynical cash grab aimed at misleading their fans with low-quality content, and exploits the likeness of Ryan and his younger sisters, Emma and Kate. Considering the negative reception of video games like Race with Ryan, as well as the Nickelodeon series Ryan's Mystery Playdate, a movie based on the franchise proves that neither Ryan's parents nor their production team learned from what happened with both the critical flops of Ryan's Mystery Playdate and the Ryan games, and the downfall of the entire channel as a whole, along with Ryan himself.
   • What makes it even worse is that it's WAY too late to make a Ryan's World movie. If it were to be released in the late 2010s, it would have made more sense. According to Google Trends, the franchise's popularity peaked in 2019, around the same time Ryan's Mystery Playdate premiered, but the film started production back in early 2022, the same year the channel's popularity began to decline more rapidly than ever before.
   • Considering most of their current videos get only about 100-300K views (less than 1% and sometimes 0.5% of the channel's subscriber count), one could say that the film is only being made to make up for the declining ad revenue earned on their newer and more obscure videos.
   • While there are other YouTube channels out there like Ryan that do milk their channels with merchandise at best just for fame, profit, or fun, Ryan's World ended up taking this to a much bigger extent to the point of making this film. This proves that their constant cash-grabbing and milking of the Ryan's World franchise has now hit full rock bottom. The film is also an example of the franchise trying to jump the shark.
   • The existence of the movie not only exploits Ryan to an even worse degree, but it also ended up making the Ryan's World franchise age even worse than it did before, probably even more than HobbyKids Adventures since while HobbyKids is also subpar at best, it is a bit better than the channel itself, and that most of the show's episodes got more views than the subscriber count of HobbyFamilyTV (the channel where the episodes are available).
   • Additionally, the film has resulted in the Ryan's World channel uploading way more videos than normal, in a similar manner to LankyBox. In the four days preceding the film's release, the channel uploaded 24 videos, mostly YouTube Shorts "promoting" and bragging about the film and its existence.
2. The film's plot is predictable, generic, and very unoriginal, taking elements from other media in a similar manner to The Emoji Movie.
   • The plot is your typical "damsel-in-distress" story, with Emma and Kate getting trapped in a mystical and surreal world, and Ryan having to rescue them while defeating a villain; this idea seems to mainly be ripped from Super Mario Bros..
   • The idea of a live-action character jumping into an animated world to rescue their loved one(s) heavily rips off Space Jam: A New Legacy, but without the basketball game.
   • The plot also seems very similar to The Powerpuff Girls Movie; both are films about superhero children that serve as prequels/origin stories to their respective franchises. Considering Emma and Kate's similarities to the iconic superhero trio, this feels even less coincidental.
3. The limited amount of characters seem to just be as bland and unlikable as their online counterparts, and both versions rip off other franchises.
   • Ryan is unlikable, out-of-character, and a bad lead for a film. He acts like a jerk to his sisters at the beginning of the film, even saying that he "doesn't want to play with them ever again". Around this part of the film, he also acts selfish toward his "best friend" Aiden. Thankfully, he does improve a bit later, although he never really gets any development to compensate for his aforementioned actions. Also, he treats Big Bad somewhat like a Butt-Monkey, since the latter's villainous motives were actually because his sister Mia stopped playing with him in favor of watching Ryan's videos. What makes Ryan feel even more like the true villain in this movie is that he uses a "mecha egg" to fight off Big Bad. Sound familiar?
   • Aiden, despite being one of the more "prominent" characters in the film, has only about 10-15 minutes of screen time. Also, she is way too old to just be Ryan's "best friend", and the relationship between the two is never properly explained.
   • Alpha Lexa is an obvious ripoff of many characters from various franchises, such as Candle Fox from Kiff, the titular character from Unikitty!, Jigglypuff from Pokémon, Angela from Talking Tom, and Velicity from Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty, both personality and design-wise.
   • Combo Panda feels like a ripoff of Po from the Kung Fu Panda franchise, being both pandas who serve as comic-relief characters. "Kung Fu Panda" also sounds a lot like "Combo Panda". He is also a Butt-Monkey, being the most humiliated and unlucky character in the film, and he doesn't serve much purpose in it, besides making awful and "witty" jokes.
   • Emma and Kate, both in the live-action and animation parts, feel heavily similar to The Powerpuff Girls, being both young superhero siblings who frequently argue, but work together to fight evil. They are portrayed as idiotic and extremely girlish troublemakers who bedazzle some of Ryan's items without his permission at the beginning of the film. Because of this, they act more like badly behaved toddlers than elementary schoolers. Also, in the animated segments, they're voiced by Brianna Jaynes, who is a woman, which results in a pretty understandable but jarring difference.
   • Clark, the owner of "Dabgib Comics", and later revealed to be "Big Bad" (yes, they were too lazy to give their main villain an actual name for his "alter-ego"), the film's main antagonist, is a generic twist "villain" whose true intentions are foreshadowed way too hard and it takes a while for the film to reveal who he is. The fact that he is portrayed as a villain due to his dislike of the Ryan's World YouTube channel, shows that the creators are against criticism of their franchise, portraying haters of the franchise as villains who don't deserve anything.
   • The other antagonists, who don't do much in the film either, are also obvious villain stereotypes that have been done to death in other media, and it's not even done as a joke. Packrat serves as an obvious Dr. Eggman clone in terms of how he acts and is designed, as well as Robo Panda and Dark Titan being evil "twins" of both Combo Panda and Red Titan/Ryan respectively. The three were also the antagonists of Ryan's Rescue Squad.
   • Stella, a bat-like character who appears exclusively in the film, has a pretty jarring Australian/New Zealand accent, even saying the word "crickey" at some point in the film.
   • Gus the Gator, Peck the Penguin, and Big Gil, who are among the franchise's most prominent characters, only appear in the final fight scene, and because of this, don't serve many purposes in the film at all, and only have a few lines.
   • Ryan's parents also don't do much and are only used as a plot device.
   • Missed opportunity: Most of the franchise's other prominent characters, such as Pinky, Coco, and a majority of the franchise's villains are completely absent from the film, although that could be that some of them were introduced after the film began production, or would've had little to offer in the film.
4. The animation, while not too bad, doesn't surpass the quality of a television series, due to the slow and stiff character movements.
   • The lip-syncing is horrendous, barely fitting the dialogue at all. The fact that the film was made specifically for English audiences and is not simply a dub makes this even worse.
   • Some of the animations are so lazy that they look like images dragged across a screen.
   • The character designs, despite translating quite well into the anime style, can look noticeably off-model at times.
   • In the post-credits scene, Combo Panda is animated using Adobe Character Animator, and although it's only used briefly for that scene, the use of the software in a film in general is a lazy and cheap idea. Even the use of motion capture in Foodfight! had more potential and could've worked a lot easier.
5. Lots of bad acting, both in the animated and live-action segments.
   • Alpha Lexa's voice acting can get so loud and high-pitched at times that it's very hard to know what she is saying, particularly in this clip.
   • Stella's Australian/New Zealand accent can get obnoxious at times. She also frequently breaks into a sing-song voice for no reason.
   • The worst offenders of this are Emma and Kate, because of how loud and obnoxious they sound in certain scenes. The scene where they argue and then get sucked into the comic book in particular sounds extremely forced, loud, and poorly-acted, with them sounding way too scripted and monotoned. Sure this may be forgiving since Emma and Kate were only young kids during the film's production, and aren't actual child actors, but it's still quite jarring.
6. The film's Latin Spanish dub is even worse, due to having extremely monotone voice acting and even some undubbed dialogue.
7. Bad cinematography that would better fit a Nickelodeon sitcom and not a theatrical film.
8. The movie tries way too hard to be hip and cool, with some examples being:
   • Later in the film, there is an entire scene revolving around the "Coke and Mentos science experiment" which lost relevancy by the late-2010s.
   • The name of the store where Ryan and Aiden get the magical comic book from is called "Dabgib Comics", which could be a reference to dabbing.
9. False advertising: Despite the heavy marketing of Gus, Peck, and Big Gil in the promotional material, they each only get about 1-2 minutes of screen time in the film, nor do they serve much of a purpose to the movie either.
10. Poor and sometimes inappropriate attempts at humor such as
    • Combo Panda farting in one scene for seemingly no reason other than be a cheap attempt at appealing to kids.
    • There's one scene where Ryan's dad talks to Aiden in a pink bunny costume, even twerking at the camera at one point. Does this remind you of something naughty and inappropriate to reference in a kids film?.
    • Also, in the scene where Emma and Kate are told to enter the comic book by Dark Titan (who is disguised as a unicorn), they say "First rule, never talk about Unicorn Club". This is an obvious and hamfisted reference to Fight Club, an R-rated film, which explains why Emma and Kate sound like they have no idea that the line they're saying is even a reference.
11. Shameless product placement, mostly for Ryan merchandise, even if a lot of them are simply in the background. This is briefly seen in some parts of the trailers.
    • As mentioned above, the film directly mentions the generally outdated "Coke and Mentos science experiment".
12. The special effects are horrendous, especially for a theatrical film. Take this scene in particular.
13. Some jarring contradictions, many of which pad out the runtime. For example, Red Titan is shown to be able to fly, but when he and his friends are in danger, for example in the volcano scene, he never uses his flying abilities.
14. There are many instances of filler, which for an 80-minute runtime is disappointing.
15. Guy Moon's soundtrack, while not abysmal, sounds like it would fit an animated web series more than a theatrical film.
    • Additionally, some tracks consist of stolen stock music from YouTube, according to the credits. Stock music was also lazily used in the video game Race with Ryan.
16. Considering the quality of this film, why did they release it in theaters?
17. The end credits are very disappointing, as they mostly just show screenshots of the film.
18. Some of the most forceful and narcissistic advertising ever seen for a feature film. The vast majority of videos from the Ryan's World channels that were uploaded in August 2024 have some kind of promotion for the film, and they upload way more videos than they used to, just to brag about the movie's existence, with some just being reuploaded across these channels. No film in existence has ever hammered in their marketing this much, not even other terrible "kids" films like The Emoji Movie or Foodfight!. Considering there was barely any marketing for the film, it further proves that it was only made as a cash grab.
    • For example, they created a website ("ryansworld.ai") that uses AI to create a custom-made superhero (similar to the mobile app "Gacha Life" or the website "Powerpuff Yourself", except they don't use AI) that can be displayed on buyable merchandise. While AI is very innovative and has the potential to improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns, it also carries significant risks of manipulation, discrimination, and the erosion of human agency. It also shows how lazy the marketing is and the wasted potential of it.
    • They made a song that only exists to remind the viewer that the film was indeed releasing on August 16, 2024, complete with extremely loud audio and a grammatically incorrect video title. Even worse, they made TEN DIFFERENT VERSIONS, one for each day leading up to the film's release.
    • And if that wasn't enough, there's even an official ad for the film made entirely with AI, complete with a deepfake of Ryan's mother (Loann) and AI-generated images. The video is only available on TikTok since a YouTube upload of the video has since been deleted.
    • Speaking of AI, a video from The Studio Space (a spinoff channel) that promotes the film has an AI-generated thumbnail.
    • Another ad for the film has Loann (Ryan's mother, who was previously infamous for shoplifting at a JCPenney store in 2003) record a brief snippet of the film in a theater, which is ILLEGAL marketing no matter what. Additionally, uploading an illegally recorded film online, depending on the length of the actual upload, can potentially get you sentenced to prison.

Heroic Qualities

1. The animation, despite its flaws, is decently well-done, being produced by Shin-Ei Animation in Japan. It is stylized to look like an actual comic book, such as the backgrounds featuring "Ben Day dots". This stylization makes the anime/manga art style work even more. Additionally, some of the scenes look visually spectacular.
   • The character designs also translate quite well into the anime style, especially Robo-Combo and Packrat. Some, like Gus the Gator and Big Gil, look even better than their American counterparts.
   • The concept of a comic book world is interesting.
2. The film's logo, being rendered in 3D, looks a lot better than other Ryan's World-related logos.
3. Clark/Big Bad is a passable main villain with a decent backstory which makes him a sympathetic character.
4. The voice acting is more tolerable than the live-action acting.
   • The voice acting from the film's villains is decent.

Reception

Box office

As of September 5, 2024, Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure has grossed $613,001 across 1,285 theaters in the United States and Canada, including $420,049 during its opening weekend. It also grossed £8,702 ($11,427) in the United Kingdom. By August 30, only 10 theaters in the United States were still showing the film, before the film finished its theatrical run on September 5.

Critical response

Despite recieving a mixed 59% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure was met with highly negative reviews from critics, who criticized the acting, writing, cinematography, and the decision to give the film a wide theatrical release, but reception of the animation was mixed-to-positive. On IMDb, the film received an overall score of 2.1/10, making it the 18th lowest-rated film, the second lowest-rated animated film (behind Foodfight!) and the lowest-rated anime film on the site. Carla Hay of Culture Mix asserted, "This cinematic junk is what happens when underage YouTube stars with no acting talent have parents who pay for the family to star in a vanity movie motivated by greed. It’s not the kids’ fault."

Trivia

• This is the first feature film made by Pocket.Watch.
• It is the first theatrical film to focus on an internet celebrity since Fred: The Movie.
• Production on the film lasted about two years, with the filming of the live-action scenes taking place throughout September 2023. The film was completed by April 2024.
• The film makes several references to Sailor Moon.
  • Stella, despite being a bat, slightly resembles a cat, and that, along with her Commonwealth accent and the fact that the film is partially an anime, is likely an obvious reference to Luna, a main character from the show.
  • Alpha Lexa's superhero costume also resembles that of Usagi Tsukino.
  • Big Bad's design also looks heavily similar to that of Tuxedo Mask.

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External links

• Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure at the Internet Movie Database
• Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure on Rotten Tomatoes
• Ryan's World the Movie: Titan Universe Adventure on Metacritic

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