As the VIEW Conference in Turin, Italy steam rolls ahead, a massive announcement rolled out from Nickelodeon and Paramount Animation.

Mireille Soria, president of Paramount Animation, finally revealed details about the upcoming The SpongeBob Movie: It’s a Wonderful Sponge, currently slated for release on July 17, 2020.

“For the first time ever, we’re going to the get to the origin of how little Spongebob met the rest of the Bikini Bottom gang at summer camp,” Soria said during her talk. “The film’s opening will take place at Camp Coral when all of our favorite characters meet for the first time.”

The film’s title includes a “nice homage to the classic movie,” per its title which is based on Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and will act as an origin tale, which makes for a fitting way to celebrate the pop culture staple, which turns 20 years old next year.

The film will be the first fully rendered CGI version of the characters and environments, which happened to the main crew in the previous film, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in its third act.

Here’s the biggest kicker, Hans Zimmer is scoring the new Spongebob film, and providing overall musical direction, which will include songs from big names (similar to how various artists contributed to the broadway edition of Spongebob), to be announced at a late date.

The first entry into the Spongebob film series, the 2d The Spongebob SquarePants Movie (2004), grossed $140 million worldwide, and the follow-up, The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015), more than doubled that total with $325m globally.

H/T – Cartoon Brew