Breaking News: Netflix Ends Skydance Animation Partnership — What It Means for the Animated Movie Pipeline

A short emergency bonus episode with Emily, Andy, and Jo, recorded in real time as news breaks during Netflix report week. The Skydance Animation partnership with Netflix is coming to an end — and Emily has thoughts.

She walks through the arc of the deal, from its origins with Apple through the flip to Netflix, and makes the case that the timing makes sense: the Paramount-Warner merger consolidating means Skydance Animation has a natural new home in that pipeline. There's one more Skydance Netflix movie still to come — a Jack and the Beanstalk project — before the partnership winds down, and a fairy-tale themed musical called Steps lands around Thanksgiving this year. The bigger question Emily leaves hanging is what Netflix now does with its animated movie pipeline, given it's been publicly chasing Disney-level animation ambition for years and just lost a key supplier.

The silver lining she spots: independent animated movies grinding through theatrical release — Chicken Hare gets a namecheck — may suddenly find their streaming window conversations getting a lot more interesting.