After securing a massive $900 million deal with ViacomCBS for six additional seasons and 14 movies, South Park will release the first two films on Paramount+ by the end of the year. Trey Parker and Matt Stone created South Park, which first aired on Comedy Central in 1997. The show now stands at 24 seasons, and their deal will take the show to season 30 and over 300 episodes. The six upcoming seasons will air on Comedy Central, while the movies are intended to stream exclusively on Paramount+.
South Park follows the exploits of a small Colorado town of the same name, which is filled to the brim with oddball characters. While the show originally focused largely on grade-schoolers Cartman, Kyle, Kenny, and Stan, the show has branched out to include everyone in town, with episodes often taking focus away from the main characters. South Park is known for its absurd humor that pulls no punches while lambasting modern culture. As the show developed, it became known for its uncommonly fast production style, which saw episodes made so quickly that they could include top news stories that broke mere days before they aired. That production style took a hit in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic, but the new deal looks to be kicking things back into high gear.
According to MovieWeb, the first two films of the 14-film deal are slated to hit Paramount+ this year. Along with a new season each year, it has been confirmed that South Park will release two movies annually through to 2027. With that plan in place, South Park looks to be bouncing back after only airing two specials since season 23 ended in December 2019.
In September of 2020, South Park released The Pandemic Special, which explored how the citizens of South Park were dealing with the COVID pandemic. That was followed by the South ParQ Vaccination Special, which aired in March of this year. The South ParQ Vacation Special saw Kyle, Kenny, Cartman, and Stan try to get their teacher vaccinated while a militant group tries to stop them. While each special continued to be a timely commentary on current events, each one only stood at an hour long in runtime.
With the new ViacomCBS deal, a serious investment has been made in the future of South Park, and though some fans may have felt deprived by the lack of content since 2019, that is all about to change. The plot of the forthcoming films is still unknown, but they are likely to stay in the style and tone audiences have come to expect from the show. Parker and Stone may also be working toward something bigger, like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, which was the first South Park movie released in 1999. Luckily, audiences will find out sooner rather than later when the new South Park movies hit Paramount+ later this year.
Source: MovieWeb