DreamWorks Animation has pumped out many hit family films over the past couple decades, ever since Shrek launched the studio back in the early 2000s. Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon… The list goes on. But they can’t all earn devoted fanbases or spawn multi-part franchises. Case in point, 2004’s Shark Tale, which is strangely swimming its way up the streaming charts this week.
Coming one year after Pixar’s Finding Nemo, DreamWorks must’ve taken a look at that timeless, artful underwater tale and decided, well, we’re not going to make something that good so let’s not even try. Shark Tale is pretty notorious these days for a variety of reasons. Including its unarguably ugly art-style, with Will Smith‘s protagonist looking like an ungodly amphibious hybrid of the Men in Black star. That said, Angelina Jolie’s fishy femme fatale has been known to cause confused feelings in certain viewers.
But the real madness of Shark Tale lies in its plot, which — for reasons to unfathomable to comprehend — is a take-off of The Godfather, because if there’s one thing we know kids love it’s gangster movies. Even crazier, though, is the fact that Godfather icon Robert de Niro and Goodfellas director Martin Scorsese are both in the voice cast. Clearly, someone needs to bring this film up the next time Scorsese starts yapping on about the state of modern cinema.
Shark Tale really needs to be seen to be believed, so maybe that’s why it’s rising up on streaming right now, gaining six places on the worldwide Netflix charts to slide into the platform’s top 50, according to the latest stats from Flix Patrol. So maybe what Smith needs to do now, to save his reputation, is to make a Shark Tale 2? You heard it here first.