Yahoo Movies Matt Groening on taking his new show 'Disenchantment' to Netflix and the 'Simpsons' moving to Disney
Matt Groening is on the move.
After launching not one but two animated television staples on Fox with The Simpsons and Futurama, he’ll have soon have not one but two new entertainment behemoths to call his corporate overlords. His first new show in nearly 20 years, the medieval fantasy parody Disenchantment, will launch on Netflix in August, while The Simpsons (entering its 30th season in September) will eventually fall under the Disney banner once the company officially acquires Fox.
Groening talked about his experiences with both companies when he came by Yahoo Entertainment’s shooting suite at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday.
And he admitted he wasn’t initially sold by the promise of Netflix. “Many, many years ago I was sitting at a film festival, and sitting in front of me were some people who worked for Netflix,” he said. “We started talking, and I said, ‘You cannot build a company on delivering DVDs through the mail. It’s not going to work.’ They said, ‘It’s called Net-flix.’ So that was intentional [to have a streaming service] from the very beginning. I didn’t think bandwidth would be wide enough for Netflix, but obviously I was wrong.”
Groening is highly satisfied with his new home so far. “They have been fantastic. They’ve let us do whatever we want to do. They’ve been enthusiastic. Every time we say, ‘We want to do this,’ they go, ‘Great!’ And we change our minds and go, ‘We’re going to go the other way,’ and they go, ‘Great!’ You can’t get better than that.”
As for if he thinks The Simpsons would have to change under the umbrella of the Mouse House, Groening simply offered, “You never know.”
But he did have a story about his early dealings with Disney too.
“Years and years ago I had a conversation with Disney, completely independent of this,” he said. “Disney has a reputation as not paying people that well, at least in animation. This was back in the day, I don’t know about now. And the explanation I was given was, ‘Listen, at Disney we give you a smaller slice of the pie, but it’s a bigger pie.’ And I said, ‘That does not make any sense at all.'”
Disenchantment premieres on Netflix Aug. 17. Watch the trailer:
Read more on Yahoo Entertainment:
