The distance between a YouTube nursery rhyme and a theatrical feature film is considerable, measured not just in running time but in ambition, risk and the nagging question of whether toddlers who loved something on a tablet will sit still for it in a darkened cinema.
Moonbug Entertainment, which acquired CoComelon several years ago, is preparing to find out. Next year the company will release The CoComelon Movie, produced with DreamWorks, in what executives describe as the franchise's most significant bet to date. The film will follow JJ, the animated toddler who has been the series' de facto star, on his first day of kindergarten — a subject that Moonbug's data scientists determined was emotionally resonant, and that parents of young children might describe using different language.
CoComelon, which posted its first video in September 2006, has accumulated more than 200 million YouTube subscribers and 200 billion views, numbers that place it among the most-watched children's properties in the world. A deal with Netflix in 2020 repackaged its short-form videos for the subscription service, where they performed well. But executives at Moonbug were aware that views alone do not constitute a franchise.
"It always had the ambition of developing a much broader franchise," said Courtney Holt, Moonbug's managing director of the Americas. "In order for a media company to really think about franchise building, you have to think about a couple different ways that you can do that."
The first step came in 2023 with CoComelon Lane, a Netflix spinoff in which — and this was apparently considered significant — the characters spoke. Other extensions followed, including a live-action series and a collaboration with Sanrio, the Japanese company behind Hello Kitty. Next year the flagship series will move from Netflix to Disney+, where it will join the preschool programming that has become newly important to that service.
René Rechtman, Moonbug's chief executive, recalled a recent taxi ride in Manhattan during which he overheard CoComelon playing in the background of a phone call between his driver and the driver's family in Nigeria. "You cannot describe that feeling," Mr. Rechtman said, though he then described it at some length.
The film's music, according to its executive music producer Justin Tranter, draws on "peak 2000s indie bands like MGMT, Passion Pit, and LCD Soundsystem" — a reference that will mean nothing to the target audience and everything to their parents, which is, of course, the point.
(Whether those parents will find sufficient nostalgia in synthesizer tones to offset ninety minutes of animated kindergartners remains, as they say, to be seen.)
Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "CoComelon Is Ready to Grow Up"