'Adventure Time: The Movie' Exists For Real With Two More Spinoff Series In Development

Nine years after rather substanceless reports in hindsight, the math is mathing in the land of Ooo

Sometimes you wanna stay where everybody knows your name. Cartoon Network Studios is officially working on three more Adventure Time projects: a movie and two spinoff series announced to be in development during Warner Bros. Animation’s studio focus panel at Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.

For Finn and Jake’s biggest adventure yet, Adam Muto continues to shepherd the franchise’s future, having been at the helm of everything since season 5 of the boys’ series. Not only is he attached, but so are Rebecca Sugar and Patrick McHale, who worked on the show before they moved on to respectively create Steven Universe and Over the Garden Wall respectively. Wording implies that some of the other superstar animation talent the show had (there’s a chart and everything of the lineage!) will be back too.

Adult Swim Announces 'Smiling Friends' Season 3, Two Series Orders At Annecy

In February 2015, Deadline reported that an animated theatrical Adventure Time movie was in development at Warner Bros with Cartoon Network Studios, produced by Chris McKay and Roy Lee, coming off of The Lego Movie the year before. It very well could’ve been after creator Pendleton Ward stepped down as showrunner the way they wrote about his involvement. It’s been nine years, I’m allowed to forget. In hindsight, it was very scant on details, about as scant as this go-round, but at least it doesn’t need a character and voice cast exploration for the main show. By the time the original series was ready to end in 2018, with no formal announcement the narrative as to what happened had two paths: either something fell through or it was in the earliest of considerations and didn’t even have stable ground to get off of yet the trades ran with it anyway.

Of the two spinoff series, one is already greenlit and one is in development. The series already a go is Adventure Time: Side Quests, which might be considered the babyfication series like We Baby Bears and Kamp Koral, at least of modern examples. Free from worries of lore, Side Quests will star Finn when he was just a kid who dreamed of epic quests and monster fights with his best friend, Jake. Other younger versions of characters to appear include Simon Petrikov, better known from his reign as the Ice King. A first-look image shown during the presentation situated Finn and Jake against a verdant rural landscape, with icy mountains in the background, animated with the series’ “hallmark pop-out colors”. Original series artist Nate Cash seems to be running this one.

Currently in development is the preschool series Adventure Time: Heyo BMO. The lovable console settles into a new neighborhood where and a group of new friends will face challenges that will teach them and their younger audience appropriate lessons, and which BMO faces with his unique brand of enthusiasm and curiosity in a quest to learn and fill his database. Muto is attached, and so is storyboard artist Ashlyn Anstee.

This was just a portion of the Warner Bros. Animation/Cartoon Network Studios slate that was revealed at the festival, and you know who else is coming back? You’ll just have to find out because that news is coming soon.

Source: Variety