Michael B. Jordan’s animated movie

Michael B. Jordan is a busy guy. He’s winning Oscars, he’s working on his remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, he’s going to co-star with Austin Butler in Joseph Kosinski’s Miami Vice remake, which I am sure will be a note-perfect popcorn movie, but as I told Lainey, will never touch Michael Mann’s 2006 Miami Vice, a meditation on loneliness and futility in a globalized world.

But before any of that, MBJ has to get through his next movie, a Netflix animated film called Swapped. It’s about a squirrel and a bird who change bodies.

Netflix trying to get in on that Zootopia business, I see.

Interestingly, Swapped is made in partnership with Skydance Animation, which falls under David Ellison’s purview at Paramount Skydance. You know who the head of Skydance Animation is? John Lasseter, who was fired from Pixar after numerous allegations of sexual harassment and a pattern of making “unwanted advances” on female employees, as well as creating a hostile working environment. That was back in 2017, just as the #MeToo movement was taking off. In 2019, even before everyone publicly gave up on MeToo, David Ellison brought Lasseter to Skydance Animation, showing once again that there is no cancel culture.

But it hasn’t been smooth sailing for Skydance Animation, even with Lasseter, widely credited as one of the key partners in golden age Pixar’s brain trust, at the helm. The first film Lasseter oversaw for Skydance Animation was 2022’s Luck, made in partnership with Apple TV+. As with so many Apple productions, it did not make a mark. In 2024 came Spellbound, this time on Netflix. It did better, simply because Netflix’s audience is way bigger than Apple TV+’s, but it didn’t make even half the impact of KPop Demon Hunters (the movie that shows that animation CAN succeed on streaming as it does in theaters).

I don’t know that Swapped will change the story for Lasseter and Skydance Animation. It looks cute enough, I guess, and they are smartly relying on MBJ’s appeal to sell the movie, but I doubt this will be a KPop moment for Netflix this summer, like KPDH was last summer. It certainly doesn’t help that Pixar itself just released an animal themed movie, too, called Hoppers. Or that f-cking Toy Story 5 is coming later this summer. This is a year in which Pixar will win Pixar’s Annual Oscar.

It makes me wonder about Lasseter’s success at Pixar all those years. He was never the only person working on those movies, Peter Docter also deserves a lot of credit for Pixar’s incredible run from the 1990s through the 2010s. But the fact that Lasseter has not, so far, come even close to replicating his Pixar success has me wondering if Lasseter got too much credit back when. Animation, like filmmaking, is a collaborative art. We should always be suspicious of the singular genius narrative, because no film is ever the sole work or responsibility of just one person. What one person can do is create a workplace so toxic, it drives multiple people out of the industry, but there are no repercussions for that, as we’ve seen. Only endless second chances.