Having ended its relationship with DreamWorks Animation just months ago, Aardman Animations is reportedly sewing up a partnership with Sony Pictures. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the animation studio behind the Oscar-winning feature Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit is ironing out a three-year, first-look deal with the studio.
Home of the Spider-Man and James Bond franchises, Sony Pictures recently entered the feature animation arena with Open Season, the first CG pic from Sony Pictures Animation. This summer, the unit will release the penguin surfing comedy Surf’s Up, before moving on to a big-screen adaptation of Judi and Ron Barrett’s children’s book, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Also in the pipeline is Hotel Transylvania, which will visit Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man and other classic creeps as they hang out together and try to cope with the notion that they are no longer relevant in modern times.
The relationship with Aardman and Sony will likely mirror that between Disney and Pixar before the merger. Sony is reportedly looking to Aardman to make a film every year to 18 months to supplement the features being made by Sony Pictures Animation. The Bristol-based toon shop will be paid a retainer to help cover overhead and development, and will also get production and marketing funding from Sony once a movie is greenlit.
Despite having a hit with the 2000 clay-animated feature Chicken Run and winning the Academy Award for the 2005 Wallace & Gromit movie, the partnership between Aardman and DreamWorks didn’t yield the box office results the studio was hoping for. Their final collaboration, the CG-animated Flushed Away, won over critics but only earned $64.5 million domestically.
Flushed Away is the first CG feature for Aardman, which is best known for the stop-motion works of Oscar-winning filmmaker Nick Park. Both stop-motion and computer-generated projects will be under consideration at Sony should the deal go through.
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