Disney to Shutter ‘Ice Age’ Animation Studio Blue Sky

The studio was owned by Fox right up until the Disney acquisition in 2019.

Disney is shutting down Blue Sky Studios, the Greenwich, Connecticut-based animation studio finest identified for the Ice Age franchise.

The studio was owned by Fox until eventually 2019 when the Walt Disney Co. obtained 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in a deal valued at $71.3 billion. At the time, Walt Disney Animation Studios president Andrew Millstein joined Blue Sky as co-president along with co-president Robert Baird both of those will be leaving the firm with the shutting of the studio. The studio also experienced roughly 450 employees.

“Given the present-day economic realities, after much thought and evaluation, we have made the difficult conclusion to shut filmmaking functions at Blue Sky Studios,” claimed a corporation spokesperson in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

The information was first described on Deadline.

Given that the acquisition, the foreseeable future of Blue Sky had been in issue, as Disney previously homes Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, arguably the two most significant makes in function animation.

In latest several years, Blue Sky has made animated functions this sort of as Ferdinand, The Peanuts Film and Rio franchise, but Blue Sky’s most precious assets is its Ice Age franchise, which has attained additional than $6 billion given that the authentic 2002 animated function debuted, spawning four sequels as well as a number of animated Tv specials and shorts. Disney will keep the legal rights to Blue Sky’s titles.

With the shutting of Blue Sky, its prepared feature adaptation of the graphic novel Nimona will stop generation. It was meant for a 2022 launch, directed by Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for his 2014 Disney animated shorter Feast. Its most latest launch, Spies in Disguise, centered on Lucas Martell’s 2009 animated limited Pigeon: Unattainable and featuring a voice forged led by Will Smith and Tom Holland, quietly opened in late 2019 subsequent the Disney acquisition.

Blue Sky was launched in 1987 just outdoors New York City by a modest team that bundled Chris Wedge, the Oscar-successful director of the 1998 animated short Bunny as very well as this sort of functions as Ice Age. The studio at first turned out commercials and other small-film work, going into feature animation with Ice Age in 1999 subsequent its acquisition by Fox.