B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations would have starred Melissa McCarthy, Seth Rogen, and Bill Murray. (Richard Brian/Sipa USA for PA/Dreamworks/Samir Hussein/WireImage for Getty)

Star names, a potent premise and two thirds finished – but what happened to animated feature B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations that means it will probably never be released?

It was January 2015 and it seemed like a normal day in the Dreamworks Animation office when they got the earth-shattering news: their big summer blockbuster that was halfway finished after 3 years of graft, was being shut down just months before its release

A phalanx of animators, FX experts and storytellers had been working on DWA’s B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations since 2012. Directed by Tony Leondis and starring the voices of Seth Rogen and Melissa McCarthy, it was about a pair of ghosts – one new, one a veteran – who work as a sort of paranormal Men In Black, policing the afterlife and those who choose to abuse it. It had originally been scheduled as a summer 2015 tentpole.

Then, suddenly with one phone call, it went back into development.

Or to translate from the Hollywood-ese, ‘We’re shutting you down’.

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For the creatives who’d been hard at work on the movie for almost a thousand days, it was a body blow. “Three years just gets flushed down the toilet,” says one animator who worked on the film, who we’ll call Tim* to protect their anonymity.

“We were pretty much towards the end of production,” says Mike* who worked high up in the production, but prefers to remain anonymous because they still work in the industry. “I would say 60% of it was completely animated.”

View photos Artwork for 'B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations' (IMDb) More

Before moving on, a quick primer on what that means with an animated movie, which are famously long-in-the-making.

Typically, an idea gets greenlit and crew is hired to build a version of the movie on storyboards, a comparatively cheap way to figure out the story’s look and tone.

Every four or five months, they might show a complete, roughly-edited version of those storyboards to the execs and that process is usually repeated several times for about 18 months until it’s agreed that production can officially begin.

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Voice actors are hired and recorded, storyboards are swapped out for layouts which feature proposed camerawork and staging and once that’s signed off, technicians will actually animate the film. That animation then needs to be graded and lit properly before it reaches the level of visuals you would expect to see in a cinema.

On B.O.O. (pronounced Boo), 30% was at that final level, with a further 30% nearly there. The remaining 40% was ready to be animated.

“[The last few months] is usually when the most work is done on these films,” explains Mike.

View photos Artwork for B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations appeared briefly on Amazon . (Amazon) More

Both crew members agree there was no suggestion they were about to be cancelled, but those who follow the industry were certainly wary of what was happening at DWA.

A relatively small public company surrounded by behemoths like Disney, they’d already held takeover talks with toy manufacturer Hasbro which fell apart in November 2014. Several of its movies had not lived up to financial expectations, including 2014’s How To Train Your Dragon 2. It was, in short, having issues.

“It was only a question of when it would be acquired and by whom, not if,” says film writer Ben Fritz, author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies.