Gearing up for a monumental 2016, Illumination Entertainment – creative minds behind the lucrative Despicable Me franchise – are branching off from those infectious Minions and into the realm of anthropomorphic animals with A Secret Life of Pets and, later in 2016, Sing.
Featuring a who’s who of Hollywood talent, today brings forth the first trailer for the latter animation, showing just how quickly things go south when Matthew McConaughey’s enthused koala bear Buster Moon decides to host a talent show.
In fear that his best days as a theater owner are behind him, McConaughey’s eternal optimist opens up auditions to everyone in town regardless of, you know, actual talent. The results are fairly entertaining, with your standard mix of pop songs and big-name cameos.
Indeed, if there’s one thing that has us excited for Sing it’s the ensemble cast, one which includes Reese Witherspoon, Seth MacFarlane, Scarlett Johansson, John C. Reilly, Taron Egerton, Tori Kelly, Nick Kroll, Jennifer Saunders, Peter Serafinowicz, Leslie Jones, Jay Pharoah, Nick Offerman, and Beck Bennett.
America Idol eat your heart out: Illumination Entertainment’s Sing will roar into theaters on December 21.
Set in a world like ours but entirely inhabited by animals, Sing stars Buster Moon (Academy Award® winner Matthew McConaughey), a dapper Koala who presides over a once-grand theater that has fallen on hard times. Buster is an eternal optimist — okay, maybe a bit of a scoundrel — who loves his theater above all and will do anything to preserve it. Now facing the crumbling of his life’s ambition, he has one final chance to restore his fading jewel to its former glory by producing the world’s greatest singing competition.
Five lead contestants emerge: A mouse (Seth MacFarlane) who croons as smoothly as he cons, a timid teenage elephant (Tori Kelly) with an enormous case of stage fright, an overtaxed mother (Academy Award® winner Reese Witherspoon) run ragged tending a litter of 25 piglets, a young gangster gorilla (Taron Egerton) looking to break free of his family’s felonies, and a punk-rock porcupine (Scarlett Johansson) struggling to shed her arrogant boyfriend and go solo. Each animal arrives under Buster’s marquee believing that this is their shot to change the course of their life.