In 2015, Blue Sky Studios announced that they had acquired the rights to ND Stevenson’s fan-favorite graphic novel Nimona. Almost a decade letter, Nimona is finally a finished movie — albeit at Netflix — and Stevenson says he “can’t believe it’s happening.” The project, which was in development at Blue Sky Studios until Disney bought 20th Century Fox and shuttered the animation house, was reportedly close to done when the sale happened in 2021, but there was no way of completing it under the circumstances. In 2022, Annapurna Pictures announced they had acquired the movie, and would air it on Netflix.
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The project stars Chloe Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed, who had been cast prior to the Blue Sky sale, making most of the key players just as surprised as Stevenson that in an increasingly inhospitable environment for animation, Nimona had managed to come back to life.
“I also can’t believe it’s happening,” Stevenson said. “I think it kind of snuck up on me when so many unexpected and sometimes devastating things happen in the production, I feel like we were all kind of guarding our hearts a little bit. Like, what unexpected curveball is going to hit us next? And now we’re all here and it’s hitting us all at the same time. It’s real. This is really happening. It is a very cool feeling after that wild ride we’ve been on to finally be at the end of it is… I’m still getting my head around it, honestly, but it’s very cool. It’s extremely cool.”
It’s also a reunion of sorts for Stevenson, who previously worked on She-Ra and the Princesses of Power for Netflix from 2018 to 2020. Both series dealt with LGBTQ+ themes and strong female leads, and during Stevenson’s interview with ComicBook.com, we asked him what he thought would happen if the two properties got to cross over.
“Oh my God. I don’t think the world would survive,” Stevenson joked. “I think that there would be a catastrophic…Yeah, that would be a lot of chaos in one place, but I think they’d get along. I think they would definitely burn something down, but they’d get along very well.”
You can see the official synopsis for Nimona below.
A Knight is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and the only person who can help him prove his innocence is Nimona, a shape-shifting teen who might also be a monster he’s sworn to kill. Set in a techno-medieval world unlike anything animation has tackled before, this is a story about the labels we assign to people and the shapeshifter who refuses to be defined by anyone.
Nimona is now available to stream on Netflix.
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