Pop open a can of spinach and get an anchor tattooed on your massive forearm, because Popeye the Sailor Man is heading back to theaters courtesy of Sony Pictures, and the studio reportedly will have Popeye in theaters on September 26, 2014.
But Robin Williams doesn’t have to dust off his sailor suit from Robert Altman’s surreal 1980 family comedy. According to the THR story where the release date news was announced, Popeye will be back in animated form through the Sony Pictures Animation branch, with Genndy Tartakovsky in the director’s chair.
Tartakovsky is riding a high right now, having delivered a massive (and fairly original) hit in Hotel Transylvania, which has earned more than $141 million to date. But as the trade notes in its story, the director is passing on an opportunity to helm the inevitable Hotel Transylvania sequel to he can pour his heart into Popeye.
As we reported a while back, Tartakovsky will make Popeye a 3D animated adventure, taking over a screenplay that has been banging around the studio for awhile. No doubt he’ll polish it with a new screenwriting team, and now we’ll be anxious to see who he gets for his voice cast (as he went pretty high profile with Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg and Selena Gomez in Transylvania). And Tartakovsky still has an incredibly devout group of followers who loved his work on television shows like Samurai Jack and The Clone Wars (in fact, some of them argued that he should be in the running to possibly helm Episode VII, but we know that isn’t happening thanks to Popeye). So brace for a new animated Popeye movie, which will be in theaters two years from now..
