Cartoon Network announced today that the network will release Ben 10 vs. the Universe: The Movie, the first full-length film that the franchise has released since it was relaunched in 2016 under the guidance of Man of Action’s Duncan Rouleau and Steven T. Seagle. The film is set for a global premiere this fall. According to a release from the network, the story will feature new characters, settings and powers for Ben, and “fans won’t want to miss his most epic adventure yet.” Currently in production, the movie will focus around a blast from Ben’s past returning to do double the damage on Team Tennyson and planet Earth itself, forcing Ben to go interstellar to save the day. Meanwhile, Gwen and Grandpa Max team up to help protect the world in Ben’s absence. But when our boy hero is confused for the villain in space, Ben must figure out a way to get back to Earth to help save it.
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Ben 10 is currently in its fourth season and takes fans on journeys with Team Tennyson through Rome, Tokyo, the Yucatán and more. New episodes continue to debut Sundays at 10:00 am (ET/PT). Ben 10 is also available on the CN App as well as VOD. The show is produced by Cartoon Network Studios and created, and executive produced by Man of Action Entertainment (Big Hero 6, Generator Rex), with John Fang (Mixels, Generator Rex) as executive producer.
Going feature-length is an even bigger jump for this version of Ben 10, which is taking its cues from a major trend in animation for the under-10 set and doing shorter episodes that can air twice per half hour.
“The format is different than it was in all of the earlier iterations,” Man of Action’s Duncan Rouleau told ComicBook.com when it launched. “The earlier iterations are all 22-minute stories; these are two eleven minutes in a half an hour. There’s a lot of different reasons for it, but the thing we found doing the 11 minutes is that it’s kind of like Ben 10 concentrate in a lot of ways. It’s like everything you want without a long, extended second act that just gets repeated again in the third act but with a fight. In a weird way, these 11 minutes have afforded us to kind of get to the point, get in, and get it, to the point where I think even we were surprised that it was working as well as it was.”
Safe money, then, is on the new Ben 10 movie feeling the need to justify all that extra time by going bigger and broader than anything fans have seen from it in recent years. We will see as the project draws closer.
