General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Muppets (2011 film)

The Muppets is a 2011 American musical comedy film directed by James Bobin and written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, in which a new Muppet named Walter and his human friends reunite the long-disbanded Muppet troupe to save their theater from an oil tycoon.¹ Released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 23, 2011, it was the Muppets' first theatrical film in more than ten years and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	November 23, 2011, wide release in the United States¹
Director and writers	James Bobin; screenplay by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller⁴
Producers and companies	David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman for The Jim Henson Company and Mandeville Films/TV; distributed by Walt Disney Pictures⁴
Budget and opening	$45,000,000 production budget; $29,239,026 domestic opening weekend⁵
Box office	$88.6 million domestic; $165,184,237 worldwide in the original release, plus $6,618,761 from a 2021 Australian re-release⁵
Awards	"Man or Muppet" by Bret McKenzie won the 2012 Oscar for Best Original Song²
Reception	95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 228 reviews; Metascore 75 from 37 reviews⁶^•⁷
Sequel	Muppets Most Wanted, released March 21, 2014⁸

Spoilers

Plot

Walter, described as the world's biggest Muppet fan and a brand-new Muppet himself, travels from Smalltown, U.S.A. to Los Angeles with his human brother Gary (Jason Segel) and Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams). Touring the abandoned Muppet Studios, they learn that the businessman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for oil discovered beneath it. To save the studio, the three seek out Kermit the Frog and help him reunite the Muppets, who have gone their separate ways, for a telethon that must raise $10 million.⁶^•²

The scattered troupe's situations give the film its reunion structure: Miss Piggy works as a plus-size fashion editor at Vogue Paris, Gonzo runs a high-class plumbing business, Fozzie performs with a Reno tribute band called the Moopets, and Animal is in a Santa Barbara clinic for anger management.²^•⁹ Rashida Jones plays Veronica, a TV executive who hosts the telethon, and the film includes cameos by roughly two dozen celebrities alongside more than 100 Muppets.²

Origins and development

The pitch. After Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008), which Stoller directed and Segel starred in and which included a puppet musical, Segel met with Disney and asked what the studio was doing with the Muppets; the studio had no active answer. On the drive home he called Stoller, and the two worked out the film's main movements on that phone call: getting the Muppets back together and staging a show to save the studio from an oil baron.³ The project carried the working title "The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made!" when James Bobin was announced as director in January 2010.¹⁰ Segel and Stoller worked on the script for four years, the first two of which passed before Disney greenlit the film.³

Production. The film was in production from November 2010 to February 11, 2011, with additional reshoots in April 2011, and was shot on Stage 28 at Universal Studios Hollywood, with a nearby stage used as a Muppet workshop.¹¹ Bobin, known for Flight of the Conchords, said he valued puppetry's low-tech quality and wanted to avoid a computer-generated look, so that Kermit's felt and Fozzie's fur remain visible on camera.¹² Digital effects were used selectively to free the characters from strings, rods, and visible puppeteers in some scenes.¹³

Performers. The Muppet cast combined veteran performers with the new character: Eric Jacobson performed Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Animal; Dave Goelz performed Gonzo and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew; Steve Whitmire performed Kermit and Beaker; and Peter Linz voiced Walter.⁷ Producer David Hoberman credited the collaboration of Whitmire and Goelz, original performers from The Muppet Show, as key to the film's development, and the crew gained respect for the puppeteers' craft during production.¹⁴ Stoller noted that the puppeteers improvised movement and dialogue on set; Jacobson improvised one of Fozzie's jokes in an Emily Blunt scene.³

Music

Christophe Beck composed the score, and Flight of the Conchords' Bret McKenzie wrote the new songs, including "Man or Muppet" and "Pictures in My Head."⁴^•³ "Man or Muppet" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 2012 ceremony.² The film also has Kermit reprise "The Rainbow Connection," and its finale features a large gathering of Muppets in a song-and-dance rendition of that song.¹⁵

Reception and box office

The film opened on November 23, 2011 against The Muppets' first theatrical appearance in more than a decade, and grossed $29,239,026 in its opening weekend from 3,440 theaters on the way to $88.6 million domestically.⁵^•⁹ Box Office Mojo records $165,184,237 worldwide for the original release across 45 markets, with a further $6,618,761 from a 2021 re-release in Australia; The Numbers lists the worldwide total as $160,461,952, a difference between the two trackers.⁵^•⁹ The Los Angeles Times reported a five-day domestic take of about $42 million over the Thanksgiving period and noted the film appealed both to children and to adults nostalgic for the 1970s television program The Muppet Show.¹⁶

Critical response. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 95% Tomatometer from 228 reviews, with the critics consensus calling it "clever, charming, and heartfelt"; Metacritic assigns a Metascore of 75 based on 37 reviews, with 92% of them positive.⁶^•⁷ Reviewers highlighted the film's balance of nostalgia and self-referential humor: the Washington Post described it as both a family film and "a winking, self-referential satire," and NPR's reviewer called it probably as good a Muppet project as possible without Jim Henson.¹⁷ The 2011 film earned an "A" CinemaScore, a grade its 2014 sequel Muppets Most Wanted fell short of with a B-plus.¹⁸

Legacy

The film relaunched the Muppets' film career under Disney and led directly to the sequel Muppets Most Wanted (2014), in which the criminal Constantine, a Kermit look-alike, switches places with Kermit during a European tour.¹⁸^•¹⁹ Rotten Tomatoes' ranking of Muppet films places The Muppets (2011) first in the franchise by Tomatometer score, ahead of The Muppet Movie (1979) at 89%.¹⁵ The film remains available on Disney+, and its revival is frequently cited as the closest later Muppet projects have come to recapturing the original series' appeal.⁶^•²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026