Production
DreamWorks Pictures and DreamWorks Animation's first interests in the film distribution rights to the Captain Underpants book series dates back to when the first book installment was published on September 1, 1997, but creator Dav Pilkey declined it. In a 2000 interview with Karen Heller from Philly.com, Pilkey expressed his first interests in the late Chris Farley as Captain Underpants, adding that he would only want a Captain Underpants film to be animated. In one effort to persuade him, DreamWorks gave Pilkey a tour around their studio with everyone wearing underpants over their pants, which made him laugh. On October 19, 2011, his representatives indicated Pilkey was ready, and DreamWorks Animation won the rights in an auction. On October 25, 2013, Rob Letterman was announced as the director, and Nicholas Stoller was announced as the scriptwriter, and both had previously worked together on the 2010 20th Century Fox film Gulliver's Travels. On January 21, 2014, the cast was announced: Ed Helms as Captain Underpants/Mr. Krupp, Kevin Hart as George Beard, Thomas Middleditch as Harold Hutchins, Nick Kroll as George and Harold's "insidious villain" Professor Poopypants, and Jordan Peele as George and Harold's "nerdy nemesis" Melvin Sneedly.
On June 12, 2014, DreamWorks Animation announced a January 13, 2017 release date. Following DreamWorks Animation's reorganization and the corporate shutdown of Pacific Data Images on January 22, 2015, due to the box-office failures of their following two different 2014 fully-fledged feature-form films, Mr. Peabody & Sherman and Penguins of Madagascar, the studio announced that the film would be produced outside of the studio's pipeline at a significantly low cost, it was instead animated at Mikros Image in Montreal, Canada, and at Technicolor Animation Productions in France, and therefore looks identical to Pilkey's original drawing style, as well as differently than many DreamWorks Pictures and DreamWorks Animation's films. A month later, Letterman left the project but came back as an executive producer, and David Soren, the director of the 2013 film Turbo, entered talks to direct the film.
During production, Pilkey got to work closely with Soren. He was relieved that Soren was directing since he was a fan of Turbo. In an interview with Los Angeles Times, Pilkey said: "Once I met David, it was like a huge load fell off my back; I was like, 'I don't even have to think about this anymore. Just send me a couple of tickets to the premiere.'" Commenting back, Soren said, "In a way, the controversy over the books ended up being liberating for the film. Normally on an animated movie, you're trying to appeal to every possible demographic, and often that results in your content being watered down a little bit. Obviously, we hope we get as wide of an audience as possible. But it's likely that if people have issues with the books they may have issues with the movie too, and we didn't feel like we needed to waste a lot of time trying to rope them in. It allowed us to make the purest version of the movie." Soren also said that he took inspiration from John Hughes films. In an interview with MovieFreak, he mentioned:
"We actually looked at a lot of John Hughes movies for inspiration, like Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Weird Science. John Hughes had this great knack for making comedies like this. Both of those movies have great friendships at the center of them. He seemed to be able to tap into the voice of a generation. They're very funny, all of his movies, but they are also poignant and they actually have meaningful things to say, which I think is why they have stood the test of time. So there's timelessness to his work that we were attempting to go for with this."
