One thing you may not have had on your 2024 bingo cards: an animated musical movie about sperm. Well, that’s exactly what we are getting with Spermageddon. My god, what a time to be alive.
This comes to us from the mind of Tommy Wirkola, more commonly known for his horror and gore-filled films. So why the change?
Horror fans know Wirkola for his 2009 Scandinavian Splatterfest Dead Snow. The comedy horror film saw students stranded on a Norwegian mountain trying to evade zombies. Nazi zombies. He has also directed other such horror-themed comedies such as Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, starring Gemma Arterton and Jeremy Renner, as well as Violent Night, which saw David Harbour as a much more aggressive Santa than we are used to. While much of his past work includes violence, blood, and gore, Spremageddon is somewhat of a departure from his usual fare.
Co-directed by Rasmus A. Sivertsen, Spermageddon has been hailed as something akin to Inside Out, though the focus is a little lower. The story revolves around two teenagers, Jens and Lisa, as they decide to have sex for the first time, and yes it’s as awkward as it sounds. We also get to follow the story of Simon the Semen, two of Jens’ sperm, as they do their biological duty and seek out Lisa’s egg. The animation also features musical numbers, because … why not, as well as a whole host of enthusiastic sperm.
Labor pains
How on earth does one come up with and finance such a project? “The pitch was: Cannonball Run with sperm,” Wirkola told Hollywood Reporter, continuing,
“I initially tried to get it set up in the U.S., and had a lot of fun meetings, with plenty of laughs, but every time it went up the ladder, there was an executive who said: ‘No, we’re not going to do that, we won’t go there.’ So I thought, let’s see if we can make it in Norway, where there are really no restrictions on what you can do, and nobody telling you that this is too much.”
Despite what some may think, that this will be overtly raunchy, the duo created something they feel is family-friendly. “Tommy and his team had the idea that this movie should look a bit like a family movie, have that cuteness, to sort of contrast with the content,” Sivertsen added.
“A gritty, adult-animated version of this script would be a very different experience, and maybe not so funny. Tommy thought it was important that the film felt like a Pixar movie and we worked a lot to develop really appealing characters, who you’d want to follow on their adventure, cheering for them along the way.”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Leading indie sales agent Charades closed a deal with Square One Entertainment for the rights to the film in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Al Munteanu of Square One Entertainment wasn’t initially sure what he was getting. “When my colleague Michael Müllner and I acquired ‘Spermageddon,’ on paper, we expected a weighty documentary on the declining male fertility rates globally,” he told Variety. “Too late did we realize that this film was, in fact, not Tommy Wirkola’s documentary, but the funniest animation movie we have ever seen.”
The movie is still looking for a U.S. distributor, though given the current climate on sex and sex education, the film could very well see itself banned from several states. Their loss.
