The R-rated 2016 animated movie Sausage Party is infamous for two reasons: the reports about terrible working conditions on the production, and the graphic, salacious humor. Longtime writing partners Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, working with Jonah Hill, came up with the story about sentient grocery store items that come to life when the customers and workers leave for the night. The food characters, including a pack of plucky sausages, the hot-dog buns they love, and a bottle of honey mustard voiced by Danny McBride, realize they’re meant to be eaten, and decide to fight back. Now, the franchise is expanding into a new show called Sausage Party: Foodtopia, according to a report from Variety.
Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Michael Cera, Edward Norton, and David Krumholtz are all returning to the series after voicing roles (or rolls, as the case may be) in the movie. New characters will be voiced by actors like Will Forte, Sam Richardson, Yassir Lester, and Natasha Rothwell.
In Sausage Party, the cast of characters uncover the truth of “The Great Beyond” outside their home in the grocery store. They stage a siege within the supermarket, rebelling against the humans who buy and sell them. Then they celebrate with a long, lovingly animated orgy. It’s certainly a strange film, and it remains to be seen how Foodtopia follows up on the food crew and their adventures.
It also remains to be seen whether Foodtopia can improve on the movie’s legendarily bad reputation around its working conditions. Animators at Vancouver-based Nitrogen Studios reported that many of them were not credited for their work on the film or paid for mandatory overtime, and claimed that executives at Nitrogen threatened to damage the reputations of anyone who quit the film or refused overtime. Sausage Party grossed more than $140 million at the box office in 2016, on a reported production budget of $19 million.