Team Bondi To Be Absorbed by Happy Feet Studio?

Today, rumors around the fate of Team Bondi have taken a surprising twist. According to anonymous sources within Dr. D, the animation studio at director George Miller’s production company, Team Bondi’s Brendan McNamara is in talks to have his company absorbed by Miller’s game studio, KMM Games. Miller is the director of the Happy Feet film franchise, and KMM is working on the game adaptation of the in-production Happy Feet 2.

Remember Happy Feet? The movie that managed to blend March of the Penguins with Footloose, Lord of the Rings, Westside Story, and An Inconvenient Truth? Yeah.

According to a post on Kotaku, which cites anonymous sources, Team Bondi’s studio head was taking a tour of Miller’s studio yesterday—an appearance which caused some friction with former Team Bondi employees currently at Dr. D:

“Brendan McNamara was seen walking through the buildings of Dr. D yesterday, where Happy Feet 2 is being made… Because Dr. D is filled with former Team Bondi employees who left due to the abusive work conditions, this unexpected visit was quite… unsettling—to put it mildly.”

The Kotaku post goes on to explain that McNamara’s reputation for sticking hard to deadlines and refusing to bend his creative vision impressed Miller—which points to how much fun it must be to work for him.

The source at Dr. D puts the potential acquisition bluntly:

“The word is going round that Team Bondi is being folded into KMM studios, Team Bondi is pretty much doomed after the scandal and can’t find any new supporters, so by doing this they can hide their name.”

Goddamn!

Kotaku tries to confirm the Dr. D source’s claims with a different anonymous source at Miller’s KMM Game studio, and reports that while the rumor couldn’t be confirmed, the KMM source “would be surprised if it wasn’t true.”

Another interesting facet to this story, says the Kotaku post, is that Miller has had to put work on a new Mad Max movie and game on hold. Why? He has to put all of his resources toward finishing Happy Feet 2 by a deadline that “many within Dr. D believe the team can’t make.” Could McNamara be just the taskmaster they’re looking for?

I’m kind of loving this, for many reasons. Happy Feet was a weird fucking movie. And McNamara has been made out to be some kind of super-villain in recent weeks, after the reports that Team Bondi’s employees were worked too hard. And now there’s talk of his studio being absorbed by the guy who’s sweating over making a sequel to a movie about a tap-dancing environmentalist penguin?

WHAT

THE

FUCK?

This is straight out of comic books, I swear. I’m half expecting the next news report to be of human-kangaroo-penguin hybrids being bred to finish work on Happy Feet 2 and to develop the company’s next game, Antarctica Noire.

Via Kotaku