Reminding us all that “McConaissance” is just a (weird, made-up) word, Matthew McConaughey has signed on to play a singing cartoon koala bear in an upcoming film. The Oscar-winning actor will play the lead role in Sing, a new animated comedy from Son Of Rambow and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy director Garth Jennings, about a theater-owning bear who decides to save his business via the tried-and-true method of putting on a show.
The show in question? A singing competition, allowing plenty of big names to pick up a paycheck by playing the competition’s quirky contestants. We’ve got McConaughey’s Mud co-star, Reese Witherspoon, playing a piglet-burdened mom; Seth MacFarlane, lending his pipes to a mouse, and Scarlett Johansson, playing that oldest of stock characters, a “punk rock porcupine struggling to shed her arrogant boyfriend.” (To be fair to Johansson’s hard-rocking rodent, the guy sounds like kind of a prick.)
The film is being produced by Universal, along with Illumination Entertainment, the studio that birthed the Minions—and, indirectly, the horror of the “Sexy Minion” Halloween costume—onto the world. Sing is planned for a December, 2016 release date; the studio’s next film is The Secret Life Of Pets, with Louis CK.