The third SpongeBob Squarepants movie titled, The SpongeBob Movie: It’s A Wonderful Sponge , will be an origin story all about the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom. The scrawny yellow sponge has been around since 1999, spawning 11 seasons and 246 episodes of nautical nonsense under the sea. The character has had a lucrative career on the small screen and is now making a return to the big screen.

So far in his cinematic career, SpongeBob Squarepants has been at the center of two feature-length films. The first SpongeBob adventure took place in 2004 and was directed by the series creator Stephen Hillenburg. The next film, called The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, was released 11 years later and heavily relied on the promise of bringing the characters to the world above the ocean, creating a live-action animation hybrid. While the first two films simply continued the adventures of the talking sponge, the third film will be taking a different approach by focusing on an origin story.

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First reported by Cartoon Brew, Mireille Soria, president of Paramount Animation, revealed at the recent VIEW conference that The SpongeBob Movie: It's A Wonderful Sponge will be an origin story. The film will explain how SpongeBob met the other inhabitants of Bikini Bottom at summer camp in Camp Coral. The film will double as an origin story for Bikini Bottom as well as a parody of sorts for the classic film It's A Wonderful Life. The movie is also said to contain a full-CG version of the underwater world, but also include hybrid scenes like the ones in the second film.

Since the cartoon had always been one of the best old-school Nickelodeon shows, it was only a matter of time before the series adapted for the big screen. The cartoon has secretly been able to hide adult jokes within SpongeBob's adventures, which has kept young and older audiences glued to the screen for years. The first two SpongeBob films got decent reviews from critics, so Paramount is no doubt hoping to repeat their success for a third time given SpongeBob's on-going popularity.

If The SpongeBob Movie: It's A Wonderful Sponge keeps its current release date of July 17, 2020, the film will be going head to head with another animated TV show adaptation: Bob's Burgers. Even though both shows have big fan bases, Bob's Burgers is geared more towards adults, which could give SpongeBob 3 an upper hand at the box office. It's also promising that l0ng-time SpongeBob writer Tim Hill will be directing the upcoming film, so if Paramount plays their cards right, this new film could easily be another box office home-run.

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Source: Cartoon Brew (via Slashfilm)