DreamWorks and Universal should be commended for sticking to their guns and releasing animated sequel The Croods: A New Age into theaters in a time where virtually every other high profile title has packed up and fled to 2021. Not only that, but the second adventure for the prehistoric family was actually moved forward by a month, and arrives three weeks from Wednesday, with the studio dropping a new promo today (see above) to hype up the release.
Animated movies are notoriously expensive to produce, meaning that there’s a huge element of risk that comes attached with premiering A New Age in the midst of a global pandemic that’s brought the entire industry to its knees. The budget hasn’t been officially revealed as of yet, but The Croods came in at a costly $175 million, and if you tack on seven years of inflation and consider the fact that the sequel was once scrapped altogether before being resurrected, then the chances are that the production costs will be even higher the second time around.
The first installment made $587 million at the box office in 2013, but there’s literally no chance of The Croods 2 coming anywhere close to those kinds of numbers given the circumstances. After all, this weekend’s number one film domestically was Come Play, which topped the charts with a haul of $3.2 million, and was one of only three movies in the top ten that even managed to bring in more than a million dollars over the three days.
That’s hardly encouraging, but the marketing campaign for The Croods: A New Age has started to ramp up regardless, with the new promo above teasing a teenage romance at the heart of the story, as well as the primary colored shenanigans that characterized the massively entertaining opening chapter.