Ice Age, Rio... The Blue Sky animation studio closes due to the health crisis
It was not a glacial episode or the fall of an asteroid that got the better of Blue Sky, but the financial crisis. The studio behind Ice Age, Robots and Rio will close its doors at the dawn of its thirty-fifth year. Founded in 1987 by Alison Brown, David Brown, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Dr. Eugene Troubetzkoy and Chris Wedge, the Connecticut-based company was part of the package the big-eared giant secured through its 2019 Fox takeover. Along with Pixar and 20th Century Animation, the multinational had three large-scale animation studios, a real maintenance cost certainly increased by the pandemic.
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Given the current economic realities, after careful consideration and evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to halt ongoing projects at Blue Sky Studio,” a studio official told Deadline. Immediate consequence, the film Mimona – the adaptation of the eponymous graphic novel – under construction since 2015 is completely canceled. The animated feature film was however 75% finished and was to be released in theaters in 2022.
Among the 450 employees of Blue Sky, several of them should be offered jobs in the Californian studios of Disney. The defunct studio's lucrative franchises are still owned by the animation giant, with a series centered on Ice Age characters being produced for the Disney+ streaming platform.
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