So you may have heard that the popular animated series Futurama is going back into production for new episodes. This is so. You may also have heard that the entire voice act is being replaced. This is almost certainly not so, though the production company has announced that they'd welcome submissions of voice demos by folks who think they can do the characters. Allow me to explain…
What this all means is that members of the voice cast (Billy West, Maurice LaMarche and others) are asking for certain amounts of money higher than Fox wishes to pay. Fox no doubt thinks (or for the purposes of negotiation, is taking the position) that the amounts are insane and astronomical. This is unlikely. All these actors have wise and experienced agents who know how profitable Futurama has been in the past and how much loot it will likely gross in the future, and what would be a fair price for its vocal stars.
The company does not want to replace those actors. Those actors helped make the show popular enough that it's still a viable commodity. Moreover, the company looks to wind up with a huge library of Futurama episodes — the old ones plus the new ones — which can rerun together for all eternity and be packaged together in mega-DVD sets. They want the same actors so Philip J. Fry will still be the same Philip J. Fry and so on.
They want those actors and have, in fact, arranged to have most of them at a panel at the Comic-Con in San Diego a week from tomorrow. But they'd like those actors for less money because that will mean more money for the company. That is why they're soliciting replacements, not because they want replacements but because they want to plant the seed of fret; to make the actors and their reps wonder if maybe, just maybe, Fox is crazy enough to actually replace the whole cast with cheaper folks so they'd better grab the latest of what have probably been several final offers.
It's hard to believe Fox could be lunkheaded enough to change casts, especially given the way they're going about it. If they really did want to replace everyone, the way to do it would be to quietly talk with the top voice agents about the top voice talent. Imagine if you had to replace Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock…and imagine you weren't even looking to introduce a new character in his stead. You had to find a new guy to play Jack Donaghy, for God's sake. You wouldn't make a big, public show of it and invite guys who work at Target Stores to make and send in auditions. You'd realize Baldwin can't be replaced like that, if at all. He's too integral a part of why that show is making you Godzilla-sized piles of cash, and that it's foolish to risk the franchise with someone else in the role. Just as it would be foolish to lose Billy West as Fry if there was any possible way to make a deal with him. When it comes down to money in this town, there almost always is.
If you're an aspiring cartoon voice actor who thinks "This is my break," think something else. They'll get thousands of submissions and it's unlikely that anyone with hiring capacity will ever listen to any of them. This is, like I said, not the way to really find a replacement. It's just a showy means of intimidating the actors and their agents…a way which costs the studio nothing. They don't even have to book time in a recording studio or have producers sit and listen to auditions. The whole idea is to be able to say to Billy West's agent, "Hey, we've got three thousand demos from guys who can imitate your boy's voice." But I know Billy's agent. He's been at this a long time and he knows how to not be intimidated and to arrive at a reasonable deal.
That's how these things end up, 96% of the time. What happens in 2% of such cases is that someone gets their ego in a tizzy and forgets that the goal is to make a deal, not to make the other guy bleed. So the bargaining explodes and everybody loses.
The other 2% of the time, it works the same way it works when a friend of yours says, "Don't pay those high garage prices. I got a guy who can fix your car cheap." So you get it fixed cheap and you honestly think you're saving money…all the way until the moment you try to shift gears while going up a slight incline and your axle shatters and your tires roll away. That's pretty much how it would go if they dumped the cast of Futurama. Which is why they won't do that.