Bad news for anyone anticipating Samurai Jack/Hotel Transylvania director Genndy Tartakovsky bringing his life-long Popeye obsession to fruition at Sony Pictures Animation: he’s no longer involved. Tartakovsky has announced that he’s off the project and will focus on other films for the studio.
It’s something of a surprise, given his feelings for the character, proudly shown off as part of a test footage demonstration last year (see above). It sounds, though, as if studio politics and creative disagreements got in the way.
“I was in love with what we were doing, but I think the studio is going through changes and I don’t know if they want to make the Popeye that I want to make,” he says. “So they’ve got to make a decision. Right now, I’m off that project and moving on to the other one that we soft-announced, which is Can You Imagine?, an original idea of my own and a very personal story. It was hard to let Popeye go, but that’s the business.”
Sony as a whole has been going through something of a corporate shake-up in the wake of the hacking incident, and there is a new regime at the head of Sony Pictures Animation, which has likely led to a shake-up of projects.
Can You Imagine?**, which he announced a year ago, is still mostly under wraps but takes a journey through a boy’s imagination. Before anything else though, Tartakovsky has to deliver Hotel Transylvania 2, which is out here on October 9.