Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 picks up right where its prequel left off. Inventor Flint Lockwood’s (voiced by Bill Hader) genius is finally being recognized as he’s invited by his childhood hero, a mash-up between Steve Jobs and Richard Branson, Chester V (voiced by Will Forte), to join The LIVE Corp., where the best and brightest inventors in the world create technologies for the betterment of mankind. It’s only after Flint, Sam (voiced by Anna Faris) and the gang move to San FranJose that Chester’s ulterior motives reveal themselves. He wants Flint’s FLDSMDFR machine, which has evolved and now capable of producing entire ecosystems of “foodimals,” all for himself. And when I say “foodimals,” we mean shrimpanzees, French fry-legged cheespiders, hippotatomus, fruit cockateils and the like.

Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “tasty sequel that gets an amusing boost from a genetically modified, marauding menagerie of tacodiles, watermelophants, sasquashes and assorted other ‘foodimals’ that have overtaken the once-tranquil island of Swallow Falls.”

The first Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movie opened at just over $30M back in 2009, and BoxOffice.com predicts that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 will top that earning $45M in its debut weekend.

Rating: PG // Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family // Runtime: 1 hr. and 35 min. // Starring: Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Will Forte  // Directed by: Cody Cameron, Kris Pearn // Written by: Judi Barrett, Ron Barrett, John Francis Daley, Jonathan M. Goldstein, Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Erica Rivinoja // Produced by: Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) // Distributed by: Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing