Ice Age 5: Collision Course

Ice Age: Collision Course is a 2016 American 3D computer-animated science fiction comedy drama film produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the fifth installment in the Ice Age film series and the sequel to Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012). The film was directed by Carlos Saldanha and Galen Tan Chu, from a screenplay by Michael J. Wilson and Jason Fuchs. Most of the cast from the previous films return in the movie, with the additions of Bradley Cooper, Adam Devine, Jessie J, Steve Buscemi, Stephanie Beatriz and Nick Offerman.

The plot revolves around Scrat, who loses his addiction to acorns and starts hanging out with Manny, Sid, and Diego, who are each in a mid life crisis about how life has gotten boring since the end of the Ice Age, however after half of the herd are kidnapped by hunters, the four heroes go on a cascade to rescue them before the arrival of a death defying asteroid kills them all.

Story
Twenty five years after the events of Continental Drift, Manny, Sid and Diego start to struggle with how life is happening way to fast and how things aren't exciting as they used to be. Scrat joins their little club of depression and old age, after taking his acorn as a treasure map instead of doing the proper thing and burying it.

Leading up to Manny and Ellie's wedding anniversary party, the trio start to feel a little better, Manny meets his daughter Peaches' fiancé, Julian, and Sid's girlfriend Brooke. Scrat starts to feel more relaxed as well, as he completely forgets about his addiction and gets on really well with the herd. During the party, a set of meteors strike the place, attracting a band of hunters that kidnap the mammoths of the party except for Jullian and Manny. Meanwhile, at the underground lost world, Buck and a trio of  flying dromaeosaurs named Gavin, Gertie, and Gary are fighting Rudy. However, the meteor shower ends up causing a forest fire in the jungle, destroying and killing everything that he's loved. Escaping out of the ground, he meets up with the main trio.

During their cascade following the humans, Buck tells them that this defiantly the sign of the end, believing that the humans might be doing something about it, using the mammoths as a means of transporting different crystals to a volcano, somewhere on the island, in order to divert a death defying asteroid away from the globe. Manny tells Buck that it's clearly a rumor and that something that happened once, mightn't happen again. And if it did, they'd be ready to say goodbye.

As The Herd travels to the crash site, they discover that the asteroids have electro-magnetic properties. Buck theorizes that if a huge quantity of smaller asteroids should be gathered and launched into orbit, the humans could be trying to attract the main asteroid as well and prevent it from falling on Earth. Scrat sees it as plausible but wonders where they'd be able to get the asteroids from. Meanwhile, with Ellie and Peaches, they start talking about marriage and how things will be different when Peaches and Jullian get married and how it would be heartbreaking. Ellie reminds her daughter that life is full of surprises and risks, and that it's fun to take a few instead of being stuck in one place forever.

Cast

 * Ray Romano as Manny, a woolly mammoth and the leader of the Herd.
 * John Leguizamo as Sid, a ground sloth and the founder of the Herd.
 * Denis Leary as Diego, a saber-toothed tiger and the member of the Herd.
 * Bradley Cooper as Scrat, a saber-toothed squirrel who joins the herd
 * Queen Latifah as Ellie, a female woolly mammoth – Manny's wife.
 * Simon Pegg as Buck, a one-eyed weasel and a dinosaur-hunter who reunites with The Herd to warn them of the coming asteroid.
 * Seann William Scott and Josh Peck as Crash and Eddie, two opossums and the "brothers" of Ellie.
 * Keke Palmer as Peaches, a young female woolly mammoth – daughter of Manny and Ellie.
 * Adam DeVine as Julian, a young male woolly mammoth and Peaches' fiancee.
 * Josh Gad as Louis, a molehog and Peaches' best friend
 * Jessie J as Brooke, a ground sloth who is Sid's girlfriend.
 * Jennifer Lopez as Shira, a female saber-toothed tiger who is Diego's wife.
 * Tara Strong as Roshan, a female human hunter who is an old friend of the main trio.
 * Nick Offerman as Gavin, a flying dromaeosaur, father of Gary
 * Stephanie Beatriz as Gertie, a flying dromaeosaur, Gavin's wife, mother of Gary.
 * Steve Buscemi as Gary, a flying dromaeosaur, Gavin and Gertie's only son

Production
Blue Sky started conceiving ideas for the fifth movie after production on the fourth movie Continental Drift had finished. The concept of Collision Course was deeply rooted in a scene from the first Ice Age film where Manny and his friends are walking through an ice cave and they spot a spaceship that's encased in ice, an item that inspired this film in the series. As with the third film, which was also inspired by the ice cave scene in which The Herd comes across a dinosaur that was encased in ice, the team went back to the first film to search for a possible inspiration for this next installment.

The writers Michael J. Wilson and Jason Fuchs decided to return to the roots of the franchise and have it focus more so on the core trio of the franchise, Manny, Sid and Diego, while doing something new with it. Their main goal was to highlight the film's emotional core and put the characters in a do or die mission and "put their audience on the edges of their seats in a different way".

The characters were first hand-drawn on animation software, complete with color and animated clips of the characters doing specific actions. They were then sent to be hand-sculpted with clay, and ultimately scanned into CGI software and animated around the model. The "Figaro's Aria" sequence which involved Buck and a trio of dromaeosaurs fighting a dinosaur called Rudy proved to be one of the most challenging sequences for Blue Sky Studios' animators, as it involved a continuous uninterrupted shot that ran for around two minutes long. It was one of the first scenes put into production but also one of the last to exit production due to its time-consuming and difficult structure, as the team would only be able to produce three or four seconds of footage a week.

The recording session took place in Los Angeles, California since most of the actors live there while the studio is based in New York City. Director Carlos Saldanha and Galen T. Chu would take turns travelling to L.A. to head the recording sessions.In the film, Simon Pegg sang a rendition of "Figaro".

A promotional poster, shown in June 2015, at the Licensing Expo, revealed the film's full title: Ice Age: Collision Course.

Soundtrack
John Powell was asked to compose the music for Collision Course but he ended up being too busy with different projects, so Hans Zimmer was brought onto the crew replacing Powell. However, most of Powell's score from the second and third films was included, along with most of David Newman's score from the first film.