Why It Took 23 Years For Chicken Run To Get A Sequel

Chicken Run is finally getting a sequel 23 years later, and there’s a significant reason that Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget wasn’t made much sooner. Back in the year 2000, audiences watched Ginger, Rocky, and the rest of the gang escape from Tweedy’s farm, and that was where their story concluded. It was a satisfying end, in all, but given the Aardman film’s success and the ambiguous promise of “freedom” for the titular poultry, there has always been room to continue the story. However, it took over two decades for this to finally happen with Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget.

As a stop-motion animated movie about chickens working to escape brutal deaths, Chicken Run certainly had a unique premise. It combined light, silly concepts with several darker themes, which ultimately seemed to work for young audiences. The Aardman film managed $225 million at the global box office and remains the top-grossing stop-motion animated film of all time. Now, the 2023 film Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget continues the beloved tale—but why did Aardman wait so long?

The Scope Of Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget Wasn’t Possible Until Recently

Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget takes the action of Chicken Run to a whole new level, and this means a lot of work for Aardman’s animators. The film’s animation supervisor, Ian Whitlock (who also served as a key animator in the original film) said (via Netflix) that there was “no way” they could have made a sequel of this scale back in 2000, or even many of the years following. Technology, as well as the kind of budget that would be allowed to Aardman, only recently reached a point when such a massive project could have even been imagined.

Whitlock has explained that Chicken Run was a relatively small film in the realm of stop-motion since the entirety took place on a single set. On the other hand, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget is set in the broad open world that the titular poultry escaped into. For example, the home that Rocky, Ginger, and the rest created for themselves in the sequel film is on an uninhabited island. Whitlock said that the opening sequence that pans across this island home took “over six months to complete from the initial brief to preparing and shooting” because the set of Chicken Run 2 was so large.

A Chicken Run Sequel Wouldn’t Have Been Worth It If It Wasn’t Much Bigger Than The Original

Of course, given the success of Chicken Run, Aardman might have managed a sequel of a smaller scale back in the 2000s. However, it’s unlikely that this would have performed well enough to justify the time and costs. Claymation is a spectacle as well as a storytelling method, and for audiences to return to the same characters, this spectacle would need to be taken to a new level. Had the studio released a film set entirely on another small set, and had there been fewer characters (rather than the now hundreds of chickens in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget), it is difficult to say audiences would have been willing to buy a ticket.

Now, 23 years after Chicken Run charmed children and adults alike, a sequel is finally being released, this time on Netflix. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget still may never see the success of its predecessor, but in this new age of streaming, and with a new generation of kids falling in love with the claymation characters, there is a far better chance that the hours spent on such a large scale sequel will be worth it.