To date, arguably the most famous feature film moment focusing on the topic of sperm is the joyful "Every Sperm Is Sacred" performance in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. That could all easily change soon thanks to the efforts of splatter horror mastermind Tommy Wirkola, who appears to be following up on David Harbour’s 2022 thriller romp Violent Night (available to stream via Peacock subscription) with a family-friendly-esque animated feature about the reproductive cells, Spermageddon. Color me invested.
Wirkola has long been best known for delivering some of the horror genre’s most hilariously brutal on-screen deaths in films such as Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead (streaming with an Amazon Prime subscription, while the first film is on Peacock) and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (on demand via a YouTube TV subscription). But instead of having blood spurting all over the place and getting into everyone’s faces, it sounds like he’ll be focusing on a wholly different viscous material with Spermageddon, which boasts one of the most genuinely amusing synopses I can think of, as seen below:
This is the story of Simon the sperm and his quest for the greatest of all. The wonderful egg. A seemingly impossible task, especially considering that they first end up in the wrong place … In the same spirit as the Sausage Party; with cute drawings, a youthful content smiliar to what we encounter in Terkel in trouble and an extremely adult language that may only be surpassed by South Park, we look forward to presenting you Spermageddon! By the way, did we mention that it is also a musical.
For all that there’s adult language teased alongside a reference to Sausage Party, Tommy Wirkola and co-director Rasmus A. Sivertsen make sure to point out when talking to THR that Spermageddon isn’t aligned with the Seth Rogen film’s overtly NSFW nature. Rather, it’s meant to be a sweet, heartfelt love story between a pair of teenagers aiming to have sex for the first time, as well as an adventure hinging on Simon and his posse making it to their Egg goal.
To that end, Wirkola thinks that a filthier and more predictable version of the script wouldn’t have been as funny, and he was far more interested in making something Pixar-esque than Fritz the Cat. Regardless of how emotionally sound it might be, this unsurprisingly isn’t the kind of project that was readily embraced by American studios when they shopped it around. According to Wirkola:
The pitch was: Cannonball Run with sperm. I initially tried to get it set up in the U.S., and had a lot of fun meetings, with plenty of laughs, but every time it went up the ladder, there was an executive who said: ‘No, we’re not going to do that, we won’t go there.’ So I thought, let’s see if we can make it in Norway, where there are really no restrictions on what you can do, and nobody telling you that this is too much.
Indeed. Even though they likely could have gotten away with something more extreme with Spermageddon, the directors maintained their goal of keeping a more human touch, and are aiming to get a PG rating in Norway and elsewhere, with the hopes that audiences 12 and older would be able to check out the film with out issue.
Naturally, a movie about singing sperm and sexualized teens is going to rub some people the wrong way — phrasing — and there's reportedly a scene involving a gynecologist singing about family planning. But it might have come across as an even more left-field project had it just been a straightforward animated story without any harmonious and rhythmic elements.
Here, Tommy Wirkola says the film in its original inception wasn't a musical at all, and that he wasn't very into the idea early on, though he came to change his tune. As he put it:
That wasn’t the original idea, but in the process of developing it with my writers [Geir Vegar Hoel and Jesper Sundnes] we came up with a few songs. I never had any desire to make a musical, but as we started playing around with it, it became a huge thing and I embraced it. Now those are my favorite parts of the movie when they explode and sing and dance, the absurdity of the musical numbers and who’s doing the singing.
Spermageddon already sounds like one of the wildest ways one could spend time being entertained, but to actually hear him bring up the absurdity of it all is music to my ears. Not that I truly believe Wirkola could craft a film that didn't have a gonzo subversive streak to it, and nor would I want that to be the case. Now who can I start emailing to make sure this new musical gets an official release in the U.S.?
Both filmmakers pointed to the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker classic Airplane! as a shared source of inspiration for the humor, so one can only hope it hits on that same level. I think I know an autopilot whose interest would be...aroused by it.
Spermageddon held its world premiere at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, but we'll have to stay tuned to see if it'll show up somewhere on the 2024 release schedule or not.
