South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone shared an official apology for the delays around their forthcoming film collaboration with Kendrick Lamar. The musical, titled Whitney Springs, was originally announced in 2022.
“We take full responsibility for the schedule delay of this movie,” Parker and Stone said in a statement to The Ankler. “We apologize to our partners at pgLang and Paramount, and we appreciate their patience. South Park and life’s circumstances have gotten in the way, but we still believe in the project.”
Whitney Springs was written by Vernon Chatman, a longtime South Park writer, and set for release at Paramount. Lamar was originally announced as a producer on the film alongside Parker, Stone, and Dave Free. According to The Ankler, it features original and previously-unreleased music by Lamar.
The film was scheduled to premiere in 2025. At CinemaCon 2024, then-Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins called it “one of the funniest and most original scripts we’ve ever read” and said that the film would be going into production that summer. Lamar was spotted filming in California later that year.
After apparently being filmed, Whitney Springs was pushed to 2026 prior to the closure of the Paramount-Skydance merger. The film was taken off the schedule completely last November.
The initial announcement described Whitney Springs as a film about the past and present coming to a head “when a young Black man who is interning as a slave re-enactor at a living history museum discovers that his white girlfriend’s ancestors once owned his.” The Ankler describes film as following the Black slave re-enactor as he clashes with the racist mayor of a Midwestern town, played by Parker.
Lamar previously collaborated with Stone and Parker on his 2022 music video for “The Heart Part 5.” The video, directed by Dave Free, features Lamar morphing into various digitally produced celebrity “deep fakes,” from Kanye West to Will Smith to the late Nipsey Hussle.
Parker and Stone will debut South Park Season 29 on Sept. 16. The duo recently announced they were changing the same of the show in a dig at Donald Trump. “Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to South America,” the pair shared in a statement. “We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount — a Skydance Capitulation.”
