I know lots of people are understandably excited, but I can't say that I'm overly eager. Obviously, I want a movie as much as anyone else, but having the plot be 'fan enters favourite cartoon' seems a little dodgy to me. There's an apocalypse going on at the moment; surely, that ought to be the focus? It's implied in the article that the destruction of Elmore will indeed feature in the movie, but how much time will be wasted on introducing this new character that would be better used on the actual story?

Also, who's this Shane Mack guy and why is he writing the script for the movie rather than the regular crew? One might say that writing for an eleven-minute TV show is different to writing for a feature film and that one needs someone with experience writing for feature films in order to produce a good script. Fair enough, so I checked what other feature films this Shane Mack fellow has written. The only previous experience he has with writing a feature film is Coffee & Kareem, which people seem to hate. That...doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me.

Still, at least Ben's in charge of the project, so there's some reassurance, provided that he actually gets a say over the creative direction of the film. Come to think of it, he mentioned on Twitter that he'd already written a script for the movie; what happened to that? Did he decide of his own volition that Shane Mack's script was a better fit, or was he forced by higher-ups to ditch his original idea for something they approved themselves? I really hope it's the former, because if it's the latter, I wouldn't get my hopes up about the quality of this movie.

More concerning for me than the movie, however, is the new series, which is giving me the same vibes as the recent SpongeBob spinoffs, or perhaps the recent Gumball clip shows if you want a more apt comparison. Do we know if Ben will be involved with this new series, or if he even wanted it? History suggests that Cartoon Network demands sequel series in return for greenlighting movies; did Ben sign off on this new series because he wanted to or did he sign off on it purely so that he could get the movie made? What would a new series even be about? Apparently, the movie will serve as a bridge between the original series and this new series rather than serving as a true finale to the franchise, which surely goes against the whole point behind the movie to begin with?

Look, I'm not going to say that the movie and series will definitely be awful, because I have no way of knowing that. I also have no way of knowing that they'll definitely be good. I can only make informed assumptions based on what we already know to be the case, and based on what we know, I'm not too excited. I could be proven wrong, of course; heck, I'd LOVE to be proven wrong here. I'd love it if everything turns out fantastic. However, I'd rather have low expectations and have them be exceeded than have high expectations and be disappointed, and based on what we know so far, it seems safer to me to have low expectations.