Disney Shutting Down Blue Sky Studios

the.dreamfinder

the.dreamfinder

Well-Known Member
Just want to add one more thing.

For all the folks who insisted Disney needed to gobble most of Fox, they didn’t. No, they weren’t going to use BlueSky to make DTV movies for D+. As I mentioned back when they were waiting for approval, it’s cheaper to expand and support two feature animation studios than it is to maintain three. It’s only a shame that they couldn’t have found a suitable buyer and killed their last feature midway through production.

They could have just bought 21CF out of the X-Men/F4 rights and Hulu and that would have been enough. Everything else they got from 21CF could have been built out internally instead of wasting tens of billions on stock buybacks to pay for this mega deal. And thousands of people who worked at 21CF wouldn’t have lost their jobs.

Growing your company organically, a novel idea, no?
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
From the Fox integration thread...

Blue Sky had Nimona and Foster on the in-development column. We're told Nimona is DOA, we can presume Foster is, too.


Anyhoo, licensing deals are still winding down before all of Blue Sky winds up on Disney+...

Blue Sky films on D+
  • Anastasia (she's even in the 'Princesses' section!)
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who
  • Epic
  • The Peanuts Movie
  • Ferdinand (and also the Disney short by the same name)
  • Ice Age 5: Collision Course
  • Ice Age: The Great Egg Escape (Short)

HBO/Max
  • Robots
  • Spies in Disguise
  • Ice Age 4: Continental Drift

Freeform
  • Rio 2

Starz
  • Ice Age 1
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs


Available only to Rent/Buy for now on several streaming services:
  • Titan A.E.
  • Rio
  • Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
  • Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (Short)
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaur
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
Magic Crush Drop said:
I'm surprised that the government even allow them to get Blue Sky because their hold in feature animation.
Click to expand...
Disney plus their new Fox holdings put out less than 2% of all movies. When you limit it to 'major films' (anything with a Box Office take of $5M or more), Disney+Fox puts out less than one-quarter of all major films.

Blue Sky was putting out one movie every one to two years. Their existence or non-existence is a blip on the market.

There are other studios not owned by Disney that put out feature animation films.

We are far from a monopoly that would trigger anti-trust action.

[The same wasn't true for sports in some countries, and that's been resolved... except for Mexico, which has no solution the government will allow, which is not Disney's fault at all since they'll do what the government wants, but the government wants something that other private companies won't do to resolve the issue.. it's a Mexican stand-off.]
 
CJR

CJR

Well-Known Member
Is 20th Century Animation still separate from Blue Sky? I know they were working on the (completed) Bob's Burgers movie.
 
PiratesMansion

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
MisterPenguin said:
From the Fox integration thread...

Blue Sky had Nimona and Foster on the in-development column. We're told Nimona is DOA, we can presume Foster is, too.


Anyhoo, licensing deals are still winding down before all of Blue Sky winds up on Disney+...

Blue Sky films on D+
  • Anastasia (she's even in the 'Princesses' section!)
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who
  • Epic
  • The Peanuts Movie
  • Ferdinand (and also the Disney short by the same name)
  • Ice Age 5: Collision Course
  • Ice Age: The Great Egg Escape (Short)

HBO/Max
  • Robots
  • Spies in Disguise
  • Ice Age 4: Continental Drift

Freeform
  • Rio 2

Starz
  • Ice Age 1
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs


Available only to Rent/Buy for now on several streaming services:
  • Titan A.E.
  • Rio
  • Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
  • Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (Short)
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaur
Click to expand...
Apparently not all of those are technically Blue Sky, though certainly they all come from Fox. Not sure what the differentiator is.

As much as the closing of Blue Sky sucks, particularly for people who worked there, and there some VERY ANGRY people on Twitter, I can't call this a surprise. It seems naive for those peole to think that Disney, which already had its own animation studio and Pixar, both of which have a reputation for making much better, more technologically advanced films, would hold on to Blue Sky out of some kind of 'you promised' level of benevolence. The way it was done wasn't great, but the writing was always on the wall the minute the merger went forward. If the Fox acquisition was 'necessary,' than Blue Sky was an obvious redundancy that came out of that deal. Obvious from minute one.

Mergers and acquisitions always start with the promises that things will stay the same, and it's always a lie. I thought we as a society understood that by now. Apparently not.
 
Twilight_Roxas

Twilight_Roxas

Well-Known Member
MisterPenguin said:
From the Fox integration thread...

Blue Sky had Nimona and Foster on the in-development column. We're told Nimona is DOA, we can presume Foster is, too.


Anyhoo, licensing deals are still winding down before all of Blue Sky winds up on Disney+...

Blue Sky films on D+
  • Anastasia (she's even in the 'Princesses' section!)
  • The Simpsons Movie
  • Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who
  • Epic
  • The Peanuts Movie
  • Ferdinand (and also the Disney short by the same name)
  • Ice Age 5: Collision Course
  • Ice Age: The Great Egg Escape (Short)

HBO/Max
  • Robots
  • Spies in Disguise
  • Ice Age 4: Continental Drift

Freeform
  • Rio 2

Starz
  • Ice Age 1
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs


Available only to Rent/Buy for now on several streaming services:
  • Titan A.E.
  • Rio
  • Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
  • Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas (Short)
  • Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaur
Click to expand...
Anastasia was made by Don Bluth’s studio, and The Simpsons Movie is from Gracie Films.
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
PiratesMansion said:
Apparently not all of those are technically Blue Sky, though certainly they all come from Fox. Not sure what the differentiator is.
Click to expand...

Twilight_Roxas said:
Anastasia was made by Don Bluth’s studio, and The Simpsons Movie is from Gracie Films.
Click to expand...
Don Bluth was a director and producer, but Fox Animation is the production studio for Anastasia..
1613057446025.png



The Simpsons Movie
1613057296820.png


I was wrong about all those movies being Blue Sky. But, they all are definitely Fox Animation. Ownership can be... tricky.

E.g., while Disney Animation Studios and Pixar make their own movies with their own in-house studios, just about every live action movie from Walt Disney Studios is made by "a production company", very often, the director's own company made for legal and financial reasons.

Often, these companies are hired by Fox or Disney to make the movie for them to own and distribute. Which makes them a Fox or Disney property, even though their own studio didn't produce them.

Sometimes a smaller company creates a film and looks for a big studio to buy it and distribute it as if it were made by the big studio.

In Blue Sky's case, they were once an independent company and then Fox bought a majority stake in it and wound up owning what they had produced and tasked them with making more content to be distributed as a Fox/Blue Sky endeavor. What makes 'ownership' even crazier is that Fox Animation was the parent for Blue Sky. That would be like Pixar being a subsidiary of Disney Animation.

And once Blue Sky came on board, Fox Animation stopped making animated feature films (except for the collaboration with Gracie Studios for The Simpsons Movie), letting Blue Sky do that for them. So technically, every Blue Sky film is also a Fox Animation Film.

Fox Animation made just two theatrically release animated features: Anastasia and Titan A.E. The rest of Fox's feature animation films were made by Blue Sky, or, sometimes in conjunction with other studios, like Gracie. These are the only three on my list which Blue Sky Studio did not have a hand in, but were made by Fox Animation. But they were definitely owned by Fox and now, Disney.

And yes, sometimes the big studio is just a distributor and not only didn't create the movie, but has no ownership rights, but that's not the case here.
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
Twilight_Roxas said:
I was only pointing out those two films that you said were Blue Sky Studios films when they’re not.
Click to expand...
But then you named them as being made by Blum production, which Anastasia was not. And Simpsons being a Gracie studio production, which, in terms of ownership, it is not, it is owned by the co-producer, Fox Animation.
 

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