Acquired by Disney in the 20th Century Fox purchase, Blue Sky Studios is best known for the Ice Age franchise of films and Rio. They also produced commercials and other lesser known projects. However, Disney has decided to close the doors on the studio. The surreal decision is truly bizarre to me from all aspects, and I thought I’d list a few here.

While other streaming services are desperately producing animation as a simpler way to create films and series for their services in this weird Covid-19 world (saving money on filming live-action locations being ‘covid secure’), Disney doesn’t seem to think they need to think about the quantity of quality productions coming to their service. Which I think is a mistake.

If you actually look at the offerings and the frequency of releases on Disney+, you’ll realise rather quickly that Disney is way behind their competitors in the space. Along with the lack of frequency, is the lack of quality in some areas – no matter how hard Disney says otherwise.

However, I think the most important sign that everything is not right in the Mouse House, is the low amount of funds Disney has to play with generally – especially the amount of cuts to products, services and parks they’ve done other the past year. Meanwhile, there’s the questionable  quality coming from Lucasfilm Animation. Plus, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation doing their own things.

What I would have done

If I was Disney, I would have kept the failing Blue Sky Studios to reform it.

Internal Powerhouse of Creation
Having a studio that isn’t tied down to any particular output for Disney, would mean that they could work on a series of projects spanning the whole of the media empire. So things like more Marvel animation projects. Perhaps merging with Lucasfilm to create higher quality output.

Blue Sky Studios could also have the opportunity to develop some of their own Disney-style productions that would contribute to the Intellectual Property hungry Mouse. Up to this point, they’ve been working on productions that were commissioned when fully operated by 20th Century Fox. So obviously, not really the same kind of output Disney is looking for. But now, won’t even see the light of day. So a complete waste of time and money for the Disney Investors.

That’s even before opening up the animation studio to commissions within Disney’s other assets – ESPN, ABC, Hulu, FX etc.

The final option would have been to bring Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad animation productions under one roof. So the productions themselves would still have artistic and ‘story’ controls – as they always had – but instead of shipping the animation off to Asia, the shows should be done at Blue Sky.

This allowing more of what Disney loves – total control in-house.

Selling the Studios
Even if they were unable to find a solution to the reforming of the studio, Disney should have sold the asset to a company that is actively investing in animation – like Netflix.

Netflix’s list of animation that they have commissioned is rather impressive – however with the fact very little live-action filming is happening currently, that isn’t really a surprise to me. Netflix is cash rich compared to Disney. Even Apple TV might have found an investment in an animation studio helpful for their distribution plans. Either way, there are enough options to sell the studios – which Disney could really do with the money.

Even DreamWorks was sold to Comcast’s NBC / Universal in 2016 for $3.5 billion – and Universal already had several animation studios in-house at that point too.

But hey, what would I know  😉