Sony Pictures Animation

Background

After the closure of the Screen Gems cartoon studio in 1946 and before the establishment of SPA, Columbia Pictures distributed a few animated films from 1959 to 2006 that were produced by outside studios, including 1001 Arabian Nights, The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!, The Man Called Flintstone, Jack and the Beanstalk, American Pop, Heavy Metal, Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Eight Crazy Nights, and Monster House.

History

In 2001, Sony Pictures considered selling off its visual effects facility Sony Pictures Imageworks but after failing to find a suitable buyer, having been impressed with the CGI sequences of Stuart Little and seeing the box office successes of DreamWorks Animation's Shrek, SPI was reconfigured to become an animation studio. Astro Boy, which had been in development at Sony since 1997 as a live-action film, was set to be SPI's first all-CGI film, but never made it to fruition. On May 9, 2002, Sony Pictures Animation was established to develop characters, stories and movies with SPI taking over the digital production while maintaining its visual effects production. Meanwhile, SPI produced two short films, the Academy Award-winning The ChubbChubbs! and Early Bloomer, as a result of testing its strengths and weaknesses in producing all-CGI animation.

On its first anniversary on May 9, 2003, Sony Pictures Animation announced a full slate of animated projects in development: Open Season, an adaptation of a Celtic folk ballad Tam Lin, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Surf's Up, and a feature-length film version of The ChubbChubbs!

On May 27, 2014, it was announced that Netflix had acquired streaming rights to films produced by Sony Pictures Animation.

On November 3, 2014, the studio collaborated with Frederator Studios' Cartoon Hangover on GO! Cartoons, an incubator series consisting of 12 short films, with at least one short film being developed into a series. The short films were funded by SPA, with the additional goal of attracting new talent for the studio.

In June 2019, Sony Pictures Animation announced that they had launched an "International" division headed by Aron Warner at the 2019 Annecy International Animated Film Festival, with Wish Dragon set to be the division's first film. The same day, they also announced an "Alternative" division aimed at producing adult animated content, headed by Katie Baron and Kevin Noel. In addition to Tartakovsky's films Black Knight and Fixed, the division's TV shows are set to include Superbago, a co-production with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios that was originally greenlit as a feature film; and Hungry Ghosts, a series based on the Dark Horse graphic novel by Anthony Bourdain and Joel Rose. They had previously announced their plans to produce adult content at the 2017 Annecy festival.

In April 2021, Disney and Sony Pictures reached a multi-year deal to let Sony's titles (such as films from the Spider-Man, Jumanji, Hotel Transylvania, Ghostbusters franchises, and other films made by Sony Pictures Animation, etc., and anime licensed by Funimation/Crunchyroll like Attack on Titan and Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works) to stream on Hulu and Disney+ following a period of availability on Netflix. A significant number of Sony titles began streaming on Disney+ starting in September 2022. It includes films from 2022 onwards.

In January 2021, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Netflix purchased the distribution rights to The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Later that year, Netflix released Wish Dragon in June, and Vivo in August. While The Mitchells vs. the Machines and Wish Dragon were released in theatres only in mainland China, Vivo was released in limited theatres in the United States. The 2025 films KPop Demon Hunters and Fixed were distributed by Netflix as part of the company's first-look deal with the streamer, with both films receiving limited releases. Fixed was originally going to be released through Warner Bros. Pictures and New Line Cinema, but it was dropped in 2024 as part of cost-saving measures by parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, with the rights returning to Sony. Netflix would instead end up purchasing the rights to the film.