New Line Cinema is getting into the animation game by optioning Planet 51, a CG family adventure being made by Spanish game maker-turned-movie maker Ilion Animation Studios. The $60 million dollar feature film follows a human astronaut named Charles "Chuck" Baker that lands on a far off world designated Planet 51. The natives of Planet 51 are extremely afraid of any space explorers and so Chuck makes friends with a younger alien more open to the idea of having his own extraterrestrial buddy. With the help of his green-skinned pal Chuck will try to get his hands back on his rocket ship and get back to Earth before he's captured by the local authorities.
Planet 51 is being directed by Jorge Blanco and co-directed by Javier Abad and Marcos Martinez. It was written by Joe Stillman (Shrek) and should be finished in the spring of 2009. Now that New Line has picked up the rights to distribute the movie the search is on for A-list Hollywood actors to lend their voices to the characters.
The CG movie craze can be big bucks for the studios that produce a winner. The Shrek franchise has earned DreamWorks over $1 billion dollars alone just from theaters not counting the merchandise or DVD sales. Disney has Pixar (or Pixar has Disney, depending on the way that you look at how that deal went down), Sony has Sony Animation (Open Season), 20th Century Fox has Blue Sky (Robots and the Ice Age franchise)...you get the idea. It makes sense for New Line to want to grab some of that easy money, and this route allows for Ilion to make the product first and New Line doesn't have to pay big bucks to start up its own in-company animation studio. But just making a kids CG movie doesn't always mean it's a license to print money, as Disney learned with Valiant a couple of years back.
