Much like The Simpsons, South Park just keeps on truckin’. Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a lucrative new deal with ViacomCBS earlier this year that will not only see South Park renewed through to season 30, but also include 14 South Park movies for Paramount+.
However, if you’re expecting those South Park movies to be worthy of the big screen, Trey Parker and Matt Stone want you to temper those expectations. The South Park creators spoke with THR to discuss the upcoming “made-for-TV films,” the first of which will drop on Paramount+ on November 25th. Titled South Park: Post Covid, Trey Parker says that the movie will find “the boys dealing with a post-Covid world. They’re just trying to get back to normal. So, it is like our show. We’re just trying to get back to normal.” Parker and Stone went on to clarify that the South Park movies won’t be feature films and will be as long or as short as the story dictates.
With Viacom, we realized we could make them as long or as short as we needed. And they then went and called them movies. They are the ones who said we are giving them 14 movies in seven years. All I can say is for me, personally, I am 52 years old, I have made three movies in my life. So you do the math.
Matt Stone added, “We’re trying to make what’s on Paramount+ different from anywhere else, so hourlong made-for-TV movies is where our head is at. We’ll do two made-for-TV movies every year. They will be big, but they are not quite movie scale.” As for the new season of the series, Stone and Parker say that while they can’t ignore the realities of the world, they are looking to return to the show’s pre-serialization roots. “We would like to get back to where each week we can to doing something totally different,” Stone said. “We tried to experiment with serialization. That had mixed results. And the past five or six years have been dominated by Trump, being political and the tonal change of society. And then the pandemic. We don’t want everything to be about the pandemic, but that is what is going on.“