I’ve been thinking about the newly-announced Peanuts film and what it will all mean for those of us in the Peanuts fan/Peanuts stuff-buying community. Here are some quick thoughts:

1. This will not be a minor film. This is coming from Blue Sky Productions, who have so far released seven movies, the weakest-performing of which did over a quarter billion dollars box office worldwide, about half of that being domestic.
2. It is reasonably likely that there will be more than one movie. Blue Sky has so far released four non-sequel movies (Ice Age, Robots, Horton Hears A Who, Rio), of which Ice Age has three sequels released to date, and Rio has one in the works.
3. There is apt to be a lot of Peanuts “stuff” released along with the movie. This is particularly true because the film is slated to come out November 25th, 2015 – which means it’s there for Christmastime viewing, and stuffed Snoopies will be just the thing to put under the tree.
4. “Stuff” will include books. Now, on one hand, one can look at a release like Rio and say that it didn’t have many books (less than a dozen), so it won’t have that much impact. However, Rio was an original; there was no Rio stuff laying around. I suspect we’ll see a lot of Peanuts kids books brought back into print, as well as new movie-specific stuff. The AAUGH Blogger will be kept busy.
5. A success is likely, because while the kids have not had as much exposure to Peanuts as in previous generations, the previous generations carry along positive feelings. As a parent, I can tell you that sometimes I look at the new kid movie offerings with a presumption that they’re dire, so I’m not encouraged to want to take the kids out for a bucket of popcorn.
6. While the trend these days is to cast big-name stars for voices for their marquee value, I suspect this is one film that won’t go that way. They may get some good names for the music.
7. A lot of the kiddie films have animated Christmas tie-in specials, so you can see an Ice Age Christmas, or a Shreck Christmas, or whatever. So I make this prediction: there will be a Peanuts Christmas special on TV the year of the film’s release!

Having said all that… it’s still three years away, so I suspect it will be at least two years before I have any news on tie-in books. About the only real news I can think of having earlier is casting news, and as I said, that is more likely to be kids than stars.

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