The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants

In an age in which IP is king, SpongeBob SquarePants isn’t going anywhere. The irreverent Nickelodeon animated television series premiered in 1999 and was over time embraced by younger millennials and the earliest members of Gen Z. It made the leap to feature film in 2004, but after a brief hiatus continued production on television. Over a quarter-century later, it’s still going, like a younger-skewing contemporary of primetime fixtures like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” Its sixteenth season is currently airing on Nickelodeon and though like everything else on television, the ratings have dropped precipitously from the glory days, down to a few hundred thousand viewers on average, the economics still work out for Nick and newly-merged parent company Paramount Skydance.

The franchise continues to make movies alongside the enduring half-hour TV episodes. Since returning to the big screen in 2015 and COVID-kneecapped 2020, the universe also spawned a pair of spin-off movies over the past two years on Netflix, the parent conglomerate’s chief competitor in the ongoing, industry-riveting bidding war for Warner Bros. Now, just in time for Christmas, we get a fourth proper theatrical motion picture release, titled The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

The SpongeBob movies made the leap from flat 2D television animation to three-dimensional CGI years ago and it’s tough to imagine them returning to the increasingly unused traditional methods. Without belonging in any way to the SpongeBob fan community, I can only speculate that the change in technique ruffles the passionate purists who have followed the line well into adulthood and that said ruffles mean little to the franchise brain trust who are still primarily making this stuff for children.

While SpongeBob has certainly been around long enough to inspire nostalgia, it’s more or less remained an active production for the past twenty-six years, so there hasn’t been much effort to retool or revive. It’s still a bunch of underwater silliness, colorful and broad enough for young children to enjoy but sly and witty enough to keep parents and weirdos entertained as well.

Search for SquarePants opens with a legend of the dreaded Flying Dutchman (voiced by Mark Hamill, replacing Brian Doyle-Murray) searching for a pure, gullible soul to break his curse. Of course, you already know the glowing pirate ghost will be targeting our bubble-blowing yellow hero (voiced, as always, by Tom Kenny), who happens to be feeling himself after discovering that he’s grown half a clam in stature to earn ipso facto “big guy” designation. That little growth spurt not only grants him access to rides more thrilling than the offerings of Little Guy Lagoon, it also imbues him with confidence to fall right into the Dutchman’s not so subtle trap.

Search was originally conceived to follow the two recent spin-offs to a streaming debut. But, in 2022, the project got reworked to a big screen return, which it makes this week across from the daunting third installment of James Cameron’s behemothic Avatar saga.

Paramount has had a rough few years since the rapturous reception Top Gun: Maverick was given in 2022. Whether well-reviewed or not, their movies seem to keep coming up short at the box office, at least when measured against the tall expectations of their lofty budgets. Perhaps their recent hit Regretting You, which has grossed $90 million worldwide on a $30 million budget, will get them to reconsider their tentpole-heavy strategy, but 2026’s locked-in slate already eschews such wisdom and diversification.

SquarePants‘ budget is believed to be in the $75 million range, which 2015’s Sponge Out of Water grossed more than four times worldwide. But just about everything about moviegoing and exhibition has changed in the past decade, including probably the popularity of this universe. I’m skeptical to read into the popularity of Burger King’s yellow-bunned themed burger as a omen for commercial prosperity. But who knows? Expectations tend to be greatly exceeded or significantly missed these days.

What I can speak to is that the movie provided intermittent fun to this childless adult viewer whose familiarity with the line goes little further than the three prior theatrical movies. The puns and playfulness often raise eyebrows, but there’s enough wit in them to stay invested, even through a dubious, action-packed finale that brings the characters into the live-action world, a trick that felt more novel a decade ago. This was only the second animated movie I saw on the big screen in 2025 and that undoubtedly sweetened the experience. It has not been a banner year for animation, but for me this easily landed among such middle-of-the-road works as Netflix’s The Twits and In Your Dreams, Pixar’s Elio, and my other theatrical view, DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys 2. Who’d have thought a decade ago that parity would emerge from these distinct studios’ divergent output? Coming up with five movies worthy of a Best Animated Feature nomination in my critics group’s awards this year is a challenge that inevitably will see me typing the titles of a mediocre movie or two to round out the field.

The Search for SquarePants is preceded in theaters by the short film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey, a holiday-themed brand deposit to the Mutant Mayhem franchise. If you read my reviews regularly, you may remember that I was one of the few critics who was not a fan of that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg-spearheaded 2023 revival, which was obscenely derivative of Sony’s Spider-Verse movies with a mere fraction of the fun. Fortunately, the new short proved less irritating, as the Turtles venture to New Jersey to do battle with an AI company that’s selling knock-off toys based on them. Taking a stand against AI in 2025 is the film world equivalent of retail companies sending out “Black Lives Matter” emails in the middle of 2020, but the Zach Woods-voiced robotic villain Chrome Dome amuses and the short wraps up in a third of the time it took 1994’s We Wish You a Turtle Christmas to do whatever it was trying to do. A pre-feature short will always enhance the theatrical experience and I’d chalk this up as a mildly pleasant surprise.