CinemaCon: Illumination to follow massive Mario success with Mike White's crapping ducks movie
Migration, written by the White Lotus mastermind, stars Kumail Nanjiani as the head of a family of wayward ducks
There are a lot of potential answers to the question “What does Illumination do next?” After years of trailing at least a bit behind its competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks with its lucrative (but not crazily so) Despicable Me/Minions franchise, the CGI studio finally has a certified hit on its hands: The billion-dollar Super Mario Bros. Movie, which is thoroughly stomping all its rivals at the box office. So what is next for the plucky upstart studio?
Obviously, it’s a an animated family comedy written by The White Lotus’ Mike White, about a family of migrating ducks who are waylaid by their youngest’s desperate need to crap.
This is per coverage today at CinemaCon, where Illumination showed off a tease for Migration, its new animated feature. The film stars Kumail Nanjiani as the father of a family of ducklings, who’s scared about letting his babies out of the pond. The film’s stacked voice cast also includes Elizabeth Banks as Nanjiani’s more adventerous wife, plus Carol Kane, Awkwafina, Certified Toad Keegan-Michael Key, and Prime Should Have Been Mario Candidate Danny DeVito.
Illumination released a teaser trailer for Migration a few weeks back, but deployed a fuller trailer at CinemaCon this afternoon, which, in the swiftly Slack messaged to us words of our own Man On The Ground, Matt Schimkowitz, contains, “a long chunk about the baby bird having to shit,” as well as “a Salt Bae parody” who’s trying to turn the family of ducks into duck a l’Orange.
Written by White, Migration is being directed by Benjamin Renner and produced by all-purpose Illumination mastermind Christopher Meledandri, who was on hand to note that ducks are already pretty much nature’s “own animated characters.” The film will open during the holiday season, 2023.