Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Tim Johnson Patrick Gilmore
Written by	John Logan
Based on	Sinbad the Sailor[1]
Produced by	Mireille Soria Jeffrey Katzenberg
Starring	Brad Pitt Catherine Zeta-Jones Michelle Pfeiffer Joseph Fiennes
Edited by	Tom Finan
Music by	Harry Gregson-Williams
Production company	DreamWorks Animation
Distributed by	DreamWorks Pictures
Release date	July 2, 2003 (2003-07-02)
Running time	86 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$60 million
Box office	$80 million[2]

Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (also known as simply Sinbad) is a 2003 American animated adventure film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by DreamWorks Pictures. Featuring the character Sinbad the Sailor, it was directed by Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore (in his feature directorial debut) and written by John Logan, and stars the voices of Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Joseph Fiennes. It tells the story of Sinbad (voiced by Pitt), a pirate who travels the sea with his dog and his loyal crew, alongside Marina (voiced by Zeta-Jones), the fiancée of his childhood friend Prince Proteus (voiced by Fiennes), to recover the stolen Book of Peace from Eris (voiced by Pfeiffer) to save Proteus from approving Sinbad's death sentence.

Development began when Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio developed the story of Sinbad in the vein of the story of Damon and Pythias before settling on a love triangle. The project was canceled in 1993, though Jeffrey Katzenberg decided to restart some ideas when he left the Walt Disney Company and co-founded DreamWorks Pictures in 1994 during the production of The Prince of Egypt (1998). Johnson, who attempted to direct his follow-up CGI animated film Tusker following Antz (1998), before eventually scrapped the project, was recruited to direct Sinbad and teamed with Gilmore. Like the studio's previous film, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002), the film combines traditional animation and computer animation. The film blends elements from One Thousand and One Nights and classical mythology. The film's traditional animation and its final line services were provided by Stardust Pictures and Bardel Entertainment, with PDI/DreamWorks handling its computer animation technology and CG character animation.

Sinbad was released on July 2, 2003, and received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the animation, action sequences, and voice performances, but criticized the storyline, polarizing CGI, and the film's departure from its Arabic origin. Grossing $80 million on a $60 million budget, Sinbad was considered by analysts to be a box-office bomb,^[3] causing DreamWorks to suffer a $125 million loss on a string of films, which nearly bankrupted them. To date, this soon became the final DreamWorks Animation film to use traditional animation as the studio abandoned and discontinued it in favor of computer animation.^[4] However, DreamWorks brought 2D animation back for the 5-minute short film Bird Karma in 2018. Until the releases of Rise of the Guardians and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken in 2012 and 2023 respectively, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas was Dreamworks Animation's biggest big office failure.