Although its $500 million box office gross was more than enough to force an automatic sequel and maybe even a spin-off TV series, The Simpsons Movie seems unlikely to get a follow-up anytime soon, according to Matt Groening. At a UCLA panel with producer-director David Silverman, Groening said of the 2007 film, “It took us four years and it killed us,” the process of drawing and then broadcasting it live for every single screening proving to be a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists. Also, he continued, it “stole animators from the show” while draining other resources, such as the show’s dwindling reserve of “Homer upsets Marge” stories. Anyway, Silverman says they could revisit the possibility of another Simpsons movie in “maybe another 10, 15 years,” by which point The Simpsons should just be reaching the halfway mark.

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