Paramount Animation Announces Yet Another Attempt At A Mighty Mouse Feature

It’s back on again. Paramount Animation has announced yet again that they are working on a Mighty Mouse feature film.

This is the latest chapter in a decades-long saga to produce a film starring Mighty Mouse, the cartoon character originally created by Isadore ‘Izzy’ Klein and Paul Terry in 1942. The last public announcement about a Mighty Mouse happened in 2019.

The first attempts to produce a Mighty Mouse took place in the mid-1990s when Cartoon Brew co-founder Jerry Beck was an executive at Nickelodeon Movies and initiated development on the project. Various other aborted attempts have been made for the last thirty years, but none have made it to screen.

Here’s the latest details, announced today in Variety:

• The key people involved in this latest attempt are Ryan Reynolds, who is producing through his production company Maximum Effort Productions, and writer Matt Lieberman, who wrote the Reynolds film Free Guy, and has penned a number of animated movies, including Rumble, Scoob!, and The Addams Family.
• The film is moving forward as part of Maximum Effort’s first-look deal with Paramount Pictures. Brad Butler, vp of animated features at Paramount Animation, is overseeing for the studio.
• No details have been announced about how the project is being structured, but we would be surprised if it was anything but a hybrid live-action/cgi film, along the lines of Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
• Mighty Mouse was first envisioned as a parody of Superman, debuting as “Super Mouse” in the theatrical animated short The Mouse of Tomorrow in 1942. The character became even more popular during the 1950s and ’60s thanks to the tv series Mighty Mouse Playhouse, which aired Saturday mornings on CBS. In the late 1970s a new show centered on heroic mouse emerged, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle, which was then followed by yet another show in the 1980s, this time created by Ralph Bakshi, titled Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures.