DreamWorks 10-year plan: Pandas and Dragons and Lions, oh my!

Do you know what you’ll be doing for the next ten years? Ya, me neither. But that certainly hasn’t stopped DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg from scheduling the studio's big-name animation line-up for the next decade.

Following the far-too-delayed death of Shrek and friends and the surprising success of How to Train Your Dragon, the animation giant has announced plans for sequels galore. A “Dragon” sequel was announced shortly after the original proved it was going the distance, and that really comes as no surprise, nor was that of a follow-up to 2008’s Kung Fu Panda.
But in an announcement as bizarre as it is ambitious, Katzenberg has declared there to be at least two follow-ups to How to Train Your Dragon, a total of four “Madagascar” films and a whopping six “Pandas.” That should amount to a fair amount of bamboo in the bank.


 

Sequels shooting back to back are no strange trend in Hollywood today, but aside from the planned Marvel series which will ultimately accumulate in an “Avengers” movie, declaring your intention to make four films (four more films that is) for a series with no pre-existing source material that might warrant such a thing is somewhat outlandish.

Katzenberg stated: "Yeah, there’s probably a fourth there. Kung Fu Panda actually has six chapters to it, and we’ve mapped that out over the years. How to Train Your Dragon is at least three: maybe more, but we know there are at least three chapters to that story. There are actually eight books."

So there you have it, straight from the Pandas mouth: expect to see a whole lot of lovable creatures over the next decade (if they can fit them all in); for better or for worse.