'The Croods 2' Moves Up To Thanksgiving, Putting It Head-To-Head With 'Soul' And Bond (For Now)

The time has come, America.

It's finally time to dust off your Croods Halloween costumes, start planning some fun Croods-themed finger foods for your next family gathering, and perfect your old Grug impression, because seven years after the original animated movie came out, The Croods 2 is finally hitting the big screen.

While the current conventional wisdom is that movie studios are shifting their films out of 2020 altogether, Universal and DreamWorks Animation are taking the opposite approach with this sequel: they've actually moved it up from Christmas to Thanksgiving.

The Hollywood Reporter says that The Croods 2, which now has the official title The Croods: A New Age, will now arrive in theaters on November 25, 2020. This animated follow-up to the 2013 movie was once killed by the studio back in 2016, but you know how that popular old saying goes: you can't keep a good Crood down. A year later, the sequel was back on track for a September 2020 release (hey, that's this month!), before being pushed back into a coveted Christmas release slot.

Of course, the coronavirus pandemic has caused the studio to rethink those plans. With very few big Hollywood productions still set to come out this year, it seems that Universal and DreamWorks are banking on this being counter-programming for No Time to Die, Cary Joji Fukunaga's James Bond film that's coming out on November 20. With much of the release calendar cleared out, and likely still more movies still to shift into 2021, perhaps the thinking is that The Croods 2 can get the most bang for its buck by tapping into a potential Thanksgiving audience and then scoop up the holiday crowds a month later, too.

But now The Croods: A New Age will also be competing with Pixar's Soul, which is also still lined up for a theatrical release on November 20, 2020. There's been speculation recently that Soul could end up getting kicked to Disney+, and perhaps that's what Universal and DreamWorks are hoping for in this scenario, because that would make them the only family game in town, so to speak. Movie theaters in the United States that have reopened recently are struggling to stay afloat since Tenet didn't drive audiences to theaters in the numbers they had hoped, so perhaps all those Crood-heads will turn out in droves to hang out with their favorite characters once again all these years later. The first movie earned nearly $600 million at the worldwide box office.

Nicolas Cage, Catherine Keener, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Clark Duke, and Cloris Leachman are back to reprise their roles from the original film, while Peter Dinklage, Leslie Mann, and Kelly Marie Tran are new additions to the cast. Joel Crawford (Trolls and Kung Fu Panda) directs.