Animation Pool Gets Deeper (Again)

Fox won't be releasing DreamWorks Animation features much longer, but it's staying in the feature-length cartoon business in a major way.

... 20th Century Fox is making it a priority to snap up various children's books and develop more live-action hybrids.

It looks like 20th Century Fox under Stacey Snider is going to be an all-in-the-family studio.

On Nov. 10, Fox Animation bought children's book Momotaro: Xander and The Lost Island of Monsters by Margaret Dilloway, which followed pickups of Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Ben Hatke's Zita the Spacegirl, Jennifer Weiner's The Littlest Bigfoot and Garth Nix's Princess and the Frog tale Frogkisser! And on Wednesday, Fox also revealed it is developing a theatrical feature based on the 2014 Oscar-nominated animated short The Dam Keeper from two former Pixar art directors.

The new projects won't all be straight animation plays. At least two — Girl Who Drank the Moon and Littlest Bigfoot — will be CG/live-action hybrids, a priority area for the studio, which hired executive Nate Hopper in September to build the initiative. ...

Fox is like every other big entertainment conglomerate. It knows that animation is one of the high-margin corners of the movie biz, and it needs to be in that corner in order to maximize profits. Even though the latest production in its Ice Age franchise had an anemic box office return of a mere $64 million in the U.S. of A., it has collected $343,105,048, giving it a world-wide total of $407,168,056, four times its production cost.

So there is no way that Fox will be getting out of making the cartoons