Following the award-winning run of his documentary Will & Harper, and with a new Spaceballs movie next on the docket for production, Josh Greenbaum has been tapped to direct a new Care Bears film for Warner Bros. Pictures.
Good Fear’s Chris Bender and Jake Weiner will produce alongside GoldDay’s Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. Sean Gorman and Daniel Barnes from rightsholder Cloudco will exec produce, with Sheila Walcott overseeing for Warner Bros. The project doesn’t yet have a writer, so it’s early days here. Asking for plot details will get you the Care Bear Stare…
Care Bears has an interesting origin story, as the franchise was built around greeting card characters popularized in the 1980s by American Greetings (now Cloudco Entertainment). Each bear had a distinct color and “belly badge” that symbolized their personality and duty — with names like Tenderheart Bear, Cheer Bear, and Grumpy Bear — the idea being to personify different emotions and positive traits to help children express their feelings and foster empathy.
The popularity of the cards led to the creation of a toy line, which then spurred animated TV specials and, eventually, a TV series. The original Care Bears cartoon aired from 1985 to 1988 and was followed by three theatrical films spanning the mid-to-late 1980s. Over the decades, the franchise has undergone several revivals. New iterations of the Care Bears TV series were released in the 2000s, 2010s, and most recently with Care Bears: Unlock the Magic, which launched in 2019.
With $470 million in global retail sales in 2024 and over $10 billion in lifetime retail, the Care Bears franchise remains a global commercial powerhouse.
Premiering at Sundance, Greenbaum’s Netflix road trip doc Will & Harper examines Will Ferrell’s decades-long friendship with former SNL colleague Harper Steele and how it changes, or doesn’t change, after she comes out as a transgender woman. The film won a Peabody and a Critics’ Choice Documentary Award for Best Documentary Feature, in addition to being nominated for a BAFTA. Currently, the director is in post on pickleball comedy The Dink, starring Ben Stiller and Jake Johnson. Next set to helm the new Spaceballs for Amazon MGM, his other credits include Universal’s Strays, cult hit comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, and the Hulu Original documentary Too Funny to Fail about The Dana Carvey Show. The filmmaker is repped by UTA, Entertainment 360, and Lichter, Grossman, Nichols.
Daley and Goldstein are repped by CAA, Fourth Wall Management, and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller; Bender and Weiner by Rick Genow & Allison Binder.
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