Longtime animator Genndy Tartakovsky has a new film he’s working on called Black Knight, and to get it made, he’s calling on his longtime audience for assistance.
On Friday, the Unicorn: Warriors Eternal and Star Wars: The Clone Wars alum released test footage for the film, which he’s been working on with his team for nearly a decade. Tartakovsky said on Instagram that Sony Animation “liked what we were doing, but they were unsure if there is an audience that would go see it theatrically. So to try something different, I thought I would share the test to see if it can get a ground swell of excitement that would change the studio’s mind.”
Black Knight is an original film centered on a 14th century knight operating a 20-foot tall suit of armor “using ropes, pulleys, and levers,” said Tartakovsky. While short, the footage shows our unnamed hero using a massive sword to fight a human-sized ninja armed with a kusarigama. The knight’s got the size advantage, but the ninja has speed on her side, though we don’t get much of an idea of what that would look like.
Still, the concept here is promising: the armor carries a lot of weight and the forest they’re fighting in looks gorgeous. Tartakovsky’s got plenty of CG experience thanks to his Hotel Transylvania movies, and you can bet it’d look good from start to finish.
Why wouldn’t Sony Pictures Animation want to make Black Knight for theaters? Because, as discussed during KPop Demon Hunters‘ rise, original animated movies finding an audience are a crapshoot, and there’s no telling what hits in the moment or takes off after the fact. (Nobody cared about Elemental until Disney changed its marketing strategy and it took off big in South Korea, for example.)
If Sony did put it in theaters, promoting it as “from the studio behind KPop” might also have general audiences thinking it’s only coming to theaters for a week or two before jumping over to Netflix. Whatever deal the two companies struck in 2021 that’s resulted in KPop and Tartakovsky’s recent raunchy 2D comedy Fixed hitting the streamer first doesn’t apply here, and Sony would probably like to not give every animated movie it owns over to Netflix right away.
None of this should take away from the fact that Black Knight should get made, given Tartakovsky’s pedigree and relationship with Sony. That’s what matters first and foremost, and with luck, enough interest will be drummed up that we can see it in some format in the years to come. Until then, there’s always Fixed, Primal, and everything else he’s made.
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