HAPPY FEET TWO Flop Leads to 600 Layoffs in Animation Dept.

HAPPY FEET TWO may have adorable animated dancing penguins, but even that couldn’t help boost its box-office performance over the past two weeks.  And now, a good chunk of the people who worked on those amazing graphics will have no job at all.

According to MSNBC, employees at Dr. D Studios, the digital production company behind HAPPY FEET TWO based in Sydney, Australia, have been told they will be laid off in the coming weeks…600 out of 700 to be exact.

Luckily for some of that chunk (not sure how many, to be exact), there will be other job opportunities at a new company that Dr. D’s parent company, Kennedy-Miller Mitchell Films plans to get off the ground in early 2012.

Dr. D Studios, which specializes in digital feature film production and high-end special effects, reportedly had hoped to compete with Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital in New Zealand. The studio is still attached to the long-delayed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD.  HAPPY FEET director George Miller is also the director, producer and writer for the first three installments of that franchise.

The original HAPPY FEET grossed $384.3 million off a budget of $100 million.  HAPPY FEET TWO, however, has so far only taken in $30.3 million worldwide as of Thursday.  Its estimated budget was $140 million.