Illumination’s Chris Meledandri on ‘Super Mario’s’ Chris Pratt Casting Controversy, Importance of Theatrical Releases
20.06.2022 - 19:53
/ variety.com
Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentIllumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri, the driving force between the “Despicable Me” and “Sing” franchises, was welcomed on stage like a rockstar at Barcelona’s CineEurope event on Monday. Founded 15 years ago, Universal’s co-owned animation banner Illumination is finally getting ready for the release “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in theaters on July 1.
The movie, which just played on opening night at the Annecy festival, had its theatrical roll out delayed by two years due to the pandemic.Meledandri made exhibitors in the room happy when he said he and Universal honchos never considered skipping theaters with “Minions: The Rise of Gru” or even “Sing 2,” or any other of his movies, to launch it on the studio’s streamer Peacock. “There was a unified point of view between myself, Donna Langley (president of Universal Pictures) and Jeff Shell (NBCUniversal Universal’s CEO) that we were going to wait for the moment that audiences were back in the cinema to release this film.
None of us realized that it was going to be two years when we made that decision. But I have to say that none of us blinked.
And I think it’s demonstrative of Universal’s commitment to audiences seeing movies,” said Meledandri, who was introduced on stage by Veronika Kwan Vandenberg, Universal Pictures International’s distribution president. Quizzed about the strategies of other studios who opted to launch anticipated movies on their streaming services to grow their subscriber bases during the pandemic, Meledandri said that as the world was in “a period of disruption, there were a lot of decisions made, and they became essentially experiments (…) and when we look back now, we see that perhaps many of those
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