Disney shutting down Blue Sky Studios

Looked but didn't see anything on this. Another casualty of the 20th Century Fox acquisition. It was announced in February that it will shut down in April.

A bit surprising considering how much money they've made with the Ice Age and Rio movies. They also won an Oscar for best animated short with Bunny in 1998.

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The studio was owned by Fox until 2019 when the Walt Disney Co. acquired 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 alongside co-president Robert Baird; both will be leaving the company with the shutting of the studio. The studio also had roughly 450 employees.

“Given the current economic realities, after much consideration and evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to close filmmaking operations at Blue Sky Studios," said a company spokesperson in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.

Since the acquisition, the future of Blue Sky had been in question, as Disney already houses Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, arguably the two biggest brands in feature animation.

In recent years, Blue Sky has produced animated features such as Ferdinand, The Peanuts Movie and Rio franchise, but Blue Sky's most valuable property is its Ice Age franchise, which has earned more than $6 billion since the original 2002 animated feature debuted, spawning four sequels as well as several animated TV specials and shorts. Disney will maintain the rights to Blue Sky's titles.

With the shutting of Blue Sky, its planned feature adaptation of the graphic novel Nimona will cease production. It was intended for a 2022 release, directed by Patrick Osborne, who won an Oscar for his 2014 Disney animated short Feast. Its most recent release, Spies in Disguise, based on Lucas Martell's 2009 animated short Pigeon: Impossible and featuring a voice cast led by Will Smith and Tom Holland, quietly opened in late 2019 following the Disney acquisition.

Blue Sky was founded in 1987 just outside New York City by a small team that included Chris Wedge, the Oscar-winning director of the 1998 animated short Bunny as well as such features as Ice Age. The studio originally turned out commercials and other short-film work, moving into feature animation with Ice Age in 1999 following its acquisition by Fox.

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The Blue Sky’s library and IP will remain part of Disney, and I hear there are no plans for another major studio to absorb Blue Sky’s employees and operations. A series based on Blue Sky’s Ice Age characters is already in the works for Disney+. Through five movies, the Ice Age series grossed $3.2 billion at the global box office.

Production on the Patrick Osborne-directed Nimona, which is dated for January 14, 2022, is being stopped and the film will no longer be released, Deadline has learned. Nimona, which had 10 months of production still left to complete, followed a young shape-shifter who teams with a mad scientist named Lord Ballister Blackheart to expose the ruler of the kingdom.

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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, tech company MAGI (which coincidentally worked on the visual effects for Disney’s 1982 classic Tron), shut down. Blue Sky’s early clients 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 animated studio began working on characters for Alien Resurrection, A Simple Wish, Mouse Hunt, Fight Club and Star Trek: Insurrection. This was prompted by Chris Meledandri, when he was serving as president of 20th Century Fox Animation.

However, it was the Wedge-directed 1998 animated short Bunny that would catapult Blue Sky into feature-length animation productions following its Best Animated Short Oscar win. Meledandri was also key in the expansion of Blue Sky with the Ice Age series before he left Fox to launch Illumination and another mutli-billion dollar franchise in Despicable Me. Blue Sky’s 2017 feature Ferdinand, directed by Carlos Saldanha, received an Oscar Best Animated Feature nomination.

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Feature Length Films


TV Specials


Shorts