Despite premiering in 1997 and going on to run for 23 seasons and counting, spawning over 300 episodes in the process, South Park has only delivered one feature film so far. While that’s still a better batting average than The Simpsons, it took almost two decades for Springfield’s most famous residents to get the big screen treatment.
Colorado’s finest hit theaters at the peak of their initial cultural popularity when South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut arrived in the summer of 1999, going on to earn $83 million at the box office on a $21 million budget and score a surprise Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, where creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker famously turned up wearing dresses out of their minds on LSD, with Robin Willaims performing “Blame Canada”.
Ever since, the Stone and Parker have repeatedly dismissed the notion of any more South Park movies, due to the intense turnaround required for 20-minute episodes of the show, as detailed in documentary 5 Days to Air. However, that’s changed significantly now that the pair have inked a massive deal with ViacomCBS that’s rumored to be worth up to $900 million, renewing the series through to 2027 while also agreeing to send no less than fourteen films exclusively to Paramount+.
The first two are even due before the end of this year, with a pair of South Park efforts planned to hit the service every year until 2027. That’s an incredible commitment, and yet another indication that Paramount+ is pulling out all of the stops to ascend rapidly up the rankings of the streaming wars as soon as possible, with the platform already announcing hugely ambitious plans to debut a new original feature every single week.
Published: Aug 5, 2021 10:20 am