Disney announced that they will be closing Blue Sky Studios, which they own after their merger with 20th Century Fox. The animation studio was best known for the Ice Age franchise, as well as Epic, Rio, and the recently released Spies in Disguise.
When Deadline spoke to a Disney spokesperson, they received this statement: “Given the current economic realities, after much consideration and evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to close filmmaking operations at Blue Sky Studios.”
Disney will retain all of Blue Sky’s intellectual property, including Ice Age, but at this time there are no reports of Disney holding onto any of the studio’s employees. The studio was working on an adaptation of Noelle Stevenson’s comic Nimona. Production on the project has now stopped, though there were ten months left towards completion and it was scheduled to come out in January 2022.
It seems highly unlikely that Disney will do anything Ice Age or any of Blue Sky’s other original properties in the near future. It seems that the studio’s “under-performance” when compared to other animation studios is what did it in, though there may be other reasons at play that we are not aware of at this time.
