I’ll admit to discovering the Uglydoll a couple of years after they became extremely popular. The wife fell in love with them, and now The Boy is slowly starting to find amusement in creating stories involving the stuffed toy.
And even though a bazillion of the stuffed plush toys have made it to market, it is time to move to the next level. That is where Illumination Entertainment and Chris Meledandri come in. Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures have joined forces to develop an animated feature length film on the line of products created by David Horvath and Sun-Min Kim.
The characters have a cult following, and they’ve been very restrictive in where and how they’ve sold them. It has been a small cottage industry, but it seems just right for us in terms of the potential for a growth curve. Most importantly, the strength cuts to the heart of our strategy, which is, to start from the perspective of characters we feel have unique appeal to audiences, regardless of age,” said Meledandri in an interview with Deadline.com.
If you are wondering how seriously to take this report, and how well Illumination Entertainment will handle the Uglydoll property, consider this – the studio was behind the highly popular Despicable Me movie, and the recent Hop movie.
