News came in at the end of last week that Gary Oldman was set to join the voice cast of Dreamworks Animation’s “Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom Of Doom,” and an official press release from Dreamworks (via Empire) has confirmed this. Oldman, predictably, will play the film’s “formidable new villain,” a peacock named Lord Shen, and the bulk of the film’s original voice cast, including Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross and James Hong, are all returning.
They’ve been joined by three brand-new cast members as well: Michelle Yeoh, who’ll play a mystical goat (it’s too long since we’ve typed those words together…) named The Soothsayer; Victor Garber, who’ll play Master Thundering Rhino, and, most surprisingly of all, Jean-Claude Van Damme as Master Croc.
It marks the highest profile role in some time for Van Damme, although it would seem to share the same problem as the casting of Jackie Chan in the original film — i.e. getting someone best known for kicking people in imaginative ways, and then only using their voice. Between our affection for the original, and the presence of Charlie Kaufman as script doctor, we’re cautiously not dreading this. Very cautiously.
The film’s release date has moved up a week, to May 27th next year, putting it head to head with “The Hangover 2,” which actually seems like a smart play — being paired with an R-rated comedy seems like a shrewd counter-programming move rather than going up against “X-Men: First Class,” which is likely to skew younger than the original mutant movies.