As it stands now, Kung Fu Panda is second only to The Dark Knight on my Best Movies Of 2008… So Far list. So maybe I should have been happy when rumors of a sequel surfaced, but Panda strikes me as one of those movies that’s just perfect as is. Doing anything else with it would only diminish it… the way a string of neverending, increasingly less good sequels has already diminished Shrek.

So right now, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. Kung Fu Panda 2 is dead… at least that seems to be going on here. When Kung Fu Panda hits DVD on November 9th, it will come bundled with a direct-to-dvd sequel called Secrets of the Furious Five. Back in June we heard that DreamWorks was already furiously at work on a Kung Fu Panda sequel project. At the time we assumed that meant a theatrical release was on the way, but this makes a lot mores sense. The reason they started work on it so early, has to have been so they’d have it ready in time to ship out along with the feature film’s DVD release.

I guess DreamWorks could still go and decided to do another real Kung Fu Panda movie, but hopefully they’ve gotten it out of their system with this, which basically amounts to little more than an extended DVD bonus feature. Two films for the price of one? I’m getting Kung Fu Panda anyway, this sounds like a bargain to me. For more details on Secrets of the Furious Five and the release of Kung Fu Panda on Blu-Ray and DVD, click over to our DVD section.