EXCLUSIVE: Disney is closing Blue Sky Studios, the former $ 5.9 billion animation division of 20th Century Fox, which during its execution produced 13 features, including the Ice Age franchise.
You could say that writing has always been on the wall for Blue Sky, especially after Disney acquired 20th Century Studios and its assets in March 2019. However, the past year has been challenging for Disney on many fronts, of course due to the pandemic, not only on the studio side, but also with theme park closings and cruise ship anchorages. Maintaining a third full-length animation studio was no longer viable for Disney, given the current economic realities caused by Covid. The last day of Blue Sky will be in April. The number of Blue Sky employees affected reaches 450. Disney will work with employees at the Greenwich, CT animation house to explore open positions at other in-house studios.
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A studio spokesman told Deadline: “Given the current economic realities, after much consideration and evaluation, we made the difficult decision to close the filming operations at Blue Sky Studios.”
The Blue Sky library and IP will remain part of Disney, and there are no plans that I know of another major studio to absorb Blue Sky employees and operations. A series based on Blue Sky’s Ice Age characters is already in the works for Disney +. Through five films, the Ice Age series grossed $ 3.2 billion at the global box office.
Production by Patrick Osborne Nimona, which is dated January 14, 2022, is being interrupted and the film will no longer be released. Nimona there were still 10 months of production to finish. Nimona followed a young shapeshifter who joined a mad scientist named Lord Ballister Blackheart to expose the kingdom’s ruler. Following Disney’s acquisition of Fox, it was announced in August 2019 that Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein was named co-president of Blue Sky Studios, serving alongside co-president Rob Baird. Millstein and Baird are expected to leave after Blue Sky closes its doors.
The latest release of Blue Sky, Spies in disguise, was distributed by Disney in December 2019, however, it did not do so well raising $ 66 million in domestic BO and $ 171 million worldwide. The hope was that the animated film with Will Smith-Tom Holland’s voice would boost a franchise.
Blue Sky Studios
Blue Sky Studios was founded in February 1987 by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their employer, technology company MAGI (who coincidentally worked on the visual effects of the 1982 Disney classic Tron), hang up. Blue Sky’s first customers included Bell Atlantic, Rayovac, Gillette and Braun, and the house created the animated insects for the 1996 MTV movie Joe’s apartment. In August 1997, 20th Century Fox’s VFX company, VIFX, took a majority stake in Blue Sky and the animation studio started working on the characters for Alien resurrection, a simple wish, mouse hunting, fighting club and Star Trek: Insurrection. However, it was the 1998 animation short directed by Wedge Bunny that would catapult Blue Sky into animated feature films after winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Blue Sky 2017 Feature Ferdinand, directed by Carlos Saldanha, it received a nomination for Best Animated Feature Film.
Blue Sky’s highest grossing animation features worldwide have been Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (’09, $ 886M), Ice Age: continental drift (’12, $ 877M), Icen Age: Meltdown (’06, $ 660M), Rio 2 (’14, $ 500M), River (’11, $ 484M), Ice Age: Collusion Course (’16, $ 408M), Ice Age (02, $ 383M), Horton and Dr. Seuss’s Who’s World! (’08, $ 297M), Ferdinand (’17, $ 296M), Epic (’13, $ 268M), Robots (’05, $ 260M), and The Peanuts Movie (’15, $ 246M) and Spies in disguise (19, $ 171 million).