McDonald’s Happy Meals have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever. 23 years after Chicken Run plopped into theaters and made history as the highest-grossing stop-motion-animated film of all time, the all-clay classic finally has a sequel. The trailer for Aardman’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget shows the original gaggle of would-be roasters putting their hard-won freedom at risk to break into Tweedy’s killing fields, which have been upgraded from a bucolic prison camp into a supermax factory farm guarded by “laser-guided exploding ducks.†Mel Gibson and Julia Sawalha voiced lead-birds Rocky and Ginger in the original, but they’ve been replaced by Zachary Levi and Thandiwe Newton for this follow-up.
A sprawling open-air jail that went from being depicted as old-fashioned in the first movie to ultra-futuristic in the follow-up? Thandiwe Newton escaping from said community only to break back in to free her own kind, who are ignorant of their fate? This isn’t just a Chicken Run movie. It’s Westworld. It premieres on Netflix on December 15, in case you’re looking for Wonka counterprogramming.