Like Lee Unkrich's vibrant Day of the Dead-themed Coco and Nora Twomey's The Breadwinner, the annual Academy Awards are an affair marked by the collision of two worlds. In Coco, there's contemporary Mexico and the land of the dead; in The Breadwinner, early 2000s Afghanistan and a world of imagination. At the Oscars…

Updated with Sunday AM figures While it will take two years or less until Disney fully controls Fox, here’s a current statistic to give you a taste of their combined box office power during a blockbuster weekend, post merger news. Currently, total domestic ticket sales look to gross $280M this weekend per ComScore…

EXCLUSIVE: CAA has signed new client Tim Federle, a co-writer of Blue Sky Studios/20th Century Fox’s animated film Ferdinand, which will bow in theaters this week. Based on the popular children’s book, The Story of Ferdinand, the pic stars John Cena as Ferdinand, a bull with a big heart who, after being mistaken for a…

For a third year in a row, Disney is rejuvenating the year-end holiday box office with a Star Wars movie. This time it’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which is poised to clear between $424 million-$440 million worldwide by the end of its first frame. In the U.S. and Canada, industry projections have had The Last…

The director of a number of films in the Ice Age and Rio series—the latter taking place in his native Brazil—Carlos Saldanha knows his animals. With his latest, Ferdinand, Saldanha gives his take on the classic story of a pacifist fighting bull, first told in Munro Leaf’s classic 1936 children’s book, and later, in an…

EXCLUSIVE: Karen Rupert Toliver has been hired by Sony Pictures Animation as SVP Development, bringing aboard the exec who has spent the past decade at Fox Animation and before that Disney. Most recently at Fox she helped spearhead development of Ferdinand, the next pic in the animation pipeline that hits theaters…

This year’s upsides at the domestic box office won’t be enough to offset the summer and October shortfalls, which will likely leave 2017 short of surpassing last year’s $11.4 billion record. Yes, even with Star Wars: The Last Jedi on marquees. Even though the Thanksgiving five-day stretch at $270.4 million was the…

No one would deny that John Cena is a bull inside the squared circle, but now the WWE superduperstar plays one on the silver screen. Here is the first trailer for Ferdinand, an animated feature from Rio and Ice Age veteran Carlos Saldanha and Blue Sky Studios, the production house behind those toon franchises. “You…

20th Century Fox/Blue Sky’s bull toon Ferdinand from Rio director Carlos Saldanha is moving out of the 2017 Christmas corridor of December 22 and will be the option for those younger viewers sidestepping Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi on December 15. Fox implemented this distribution strategy last year…

EXCLUSIVE: Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias has signed on to voice the character of Cuatro in the 20th Century Fox animated film Ferdinand and is also set to voice Jokey in Sony Pictures’ upcoming Smurfs: The Lost Village. The latter is dated for April 2017, while Fox will release Ferdinand around Christmas 2017. The cast…