What became of Jack Black’s Ice Age villain Zeke? While he’s best known for his live-action roles in films like School Of Rock or the Jumanji franchise, actor-musician Jack Black has taken on quite a few voice roles during his career. He’s the voice behind giant panda-turned-martial artist Po in the DreamWorks Animation series Kung Fu Panda and voiced a cartoon version of himself in the animated web show Tenacious D In Post-Apocalypto. He was also cast as the voice of iconic villain Bowser in Illumination Entertainment’s upcoming Super Mario Bros movie, which is due in late 2022.
Jack Black’s first big voice role came playing Zeke in the original Ice Age movie. Released back in 2002, the animated movie follows the adventures of a trio of prehistoric mammals – woolly mammoth Manny (Ray Romano), ground sloth Sid (John Leguizamo) and saber-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) – who team up to reunite a human baby named Roshan (Tara Strong) with its tribe while heading southwards to escape the impending ice age.
The original Ice Age movie contains a redemption arc for Denis Leary’s character Diego. He starts as an underling of fellow saber-toothed tiger Soto (Goran Višnjić) and is tasked with retrieving Roshan so that he and his pals can eat the child as revenge for his human tribe killing half of their pack. To that end, Diego joins Manny, Sid and Roshan on their travels but soon has a change of heart and decides to help them instead. However, that means duping his fellow pack members – one of which is Black’s Ice Age character, Zeke.
Zeke is a rather hyperactive member of Diego’s saber-toothed tiger pack and demonstrates a pretty obsessive compulsion to chow down on woolly mammoth meat (AKA Manny) throughout Ice Age. Towards the end of the movie, Jack Black's character Zeke corners Sid and Roshan but the ground sloth manages to shove the saber-toothed tiger into a rock crevice before he can do them any harm. Zeke hasn’t been seen in any of the other Ice Age movies, so it’s assumed he died from starvation and/or thirst while trapped in the crevice.
Of all the saber-toothed tiger characters featured in the original movie, only Diego has made it into the Ice Age franchise’s subsequent sequels, which gives weight to the theory that Zeke most likely perished. That said, a sixth Ice Age movie is in the works so there’s always a slim chance Black could reprise his role as Zeke. Until then, however, it seems like it’s a case of RIP to Jack Black’s Ice Age character.