Dreamworks Swaps ‘Home’ & ‘The Penguins of Madagascar’ Release Dates

Dreamworks Animation has swapped the release dates of its animated films, Home and The Penguins of Madagascar. Now, Home will be released on March 27, 2015 and The Penguins of Madagascar will be released this year on November 26.

The press release that revealed this news was actually pretty funny and tongue in cheek. With a title of “High-fives All Around: The Penguins of Madagascar Recruited for Top-secret Assignment This Fall”, the release then goes on to turn this situation into a funny positive one, even quoting the penguins and Captain Smek from Home themselves.

Dawn Taubin, Chief Marketing Officer at DreamWorks Animation commented:

“We will continue to be as flexible as necessary when it comes to our release dates.  We see a unique opportunity for our next two films by having the ‘Penguins of Madagascar’ move onto November 26 of this year and ‘Home’ move onto March 27, 2015.  We’re confident that this date switch gives both of our upcoming releases the largest opportunity for success.”

As alluded to in Taubin’s last sentence, Home probably wasn’t going to stand a chance against Big Hero 6, Disney’s flick that is released a few weeks prior on November 7. While both films are non-sequels, both studios’ track records–Disney with the wildly successful Frozen and DreamWorks with a string of somewhat successful films such as Mr. Peabody & Sherman and Turbo–it seems like a better bet for DreamWorks to position the Penguins spin-off against Big Hero 6, since the characters are already popular, familiar and successful.

This is great news as I wasn’t excited at all about Home. The film about a group of aliens who hide out on Earth from their enemies never interested me as I thought the story was stupid, the character designs were too unsophisticated, and I could never get over Rihanna being cast to lend her voice in an animated feature.

But, I was always excited about The Penguins of Madagascar because it would be based on my favorite characters from the Madagascar franchise as well as feature the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch, and who doesn’t love Benedict Cumberbatch?

What’s your opinion on this swap? Do you think it’s better this way or should it have stayed the way it was before? What do you think of these two movies in particular?