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John Lasseter’s Skydance Animation wants its movies to feel like 70s and 80s Spielberg and Lucas event films, a Cosmic Book News insider tells us.
The shift kicks in as Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn arrives in December and the studio’s Netflix deal wraps up.
“Skydance Animation (under Paramount) is run by former Pixar head John Lasseter and now that they’re done with the Pixar deal (with Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn the last film in the deal), the emphasis is to get back to the philosophy of making animation worthy of a theatrical event experience, like a 70s/80s Spielberg-Lucas film as an animated film,” the insider tells us.
“That was the original Pixar philosophy,” the insider added.
The “Pixar deal” shorthand fits the people involved. Lasseter ran Pixar. Bird made The Incredibles and Ratatouille there. The deal itself is with Netflix, and it is ending.
Ray Gunn Ends The Netflix Era
This month, Paramount and Netflix announced they are winding down the Skydance Animation output deal signed back in 2023.
That deal put Spellbound, this year’s hit Swapped, and now Ray Gunn on Netflix. Before it, the studio’s first movie, Luck, went to Apple TV+ in 2022.
As we covered with the Ray Gunn trailer, Netflix has been paying the movie’s reported $150 million-plus budget, and the final two films under the deal are Ray Gunn and an untitled Jack and the Beanstalk movie from Zootopia director Rich Moore.
Ray Gunn plays select theaters starting December 4, including 70mm screenings, before streaming December 18.
Booking 70mm for an animated movie is the event experience the insider is describing, already in practice.
Once the Beanstalk movie is delivered, Skydance Animation’s films head to theaters, released by the studio Lasseter’s boss now owns.
“Every Property From 1970-2000”
The Spielberg-Lucas target lines up with what a Paramount insider told us back in August.
“Every property from 1970-2000 is getting a second and third look. I’m talking TV and movies,” that source said, summing up the thinking with “nostalgia is the new woke.”
Now the animation studio is chasing the same window. Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. Those are the movies that invented the theatrical event, and the pitch is that animation can deliver one.
Lasseter built the original Pixar on that idea, directing Toy Story in 1995. Bird said it himself when the trailer dropped: animation is “too interesting to limit what kind of stories can be told.”
It is also the fourth story out of the same insider drop this week, alongside The Dark Knight Returns two-part event movie, De Luca and Abdy staying at Warner Bros., and Casey Bloys playing competing offers.
Ray Gunn is in theaters December 4. The original Pixar philosophy comes back after that.
