When the first Ice Age movie arrived back in 2002, it was a huge hit for animation studio Blue Sky Studios, with audiences falling fast for the antics of a bunch of prehistoric creatures. The movie introduced us to accident-prone sloth Sid, standoffish mammoth Manny and sabre-toothed tiger Diego, not to mention scrappy squirrel Scrat and his eternal quest to bury his acorn at any cost.
Since then, five sequel films have been released, with the herd meeting new pals like Manny’s love interest Ellie, dinosaur hunter Buck and sabre-toothed pirate Shira. The franchise has earned $6 billion at the box office, though the sixth movie, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, was released on Disney Plus.
A spin-off TV series, focusing on Scrat’s misadventures, also landed on the streaming platform earlier this year.
As well as the six movies, the characters have also popped up in a selection of short films, which largely focus on Scrat’s escapades.
Unlike so many film franchises, the Ice Age movies follow a pretty straightforward timeline, as the release and the chronological order are one and the same. Here’s what you need to know if you fancy diving back into the series…
How to watch the Ice Age movies in chronological order
Ice Age (2002)
Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) is left behind by his family as a herd of prehistoric creatures begins the migration south in an attempt to dodge the impending Ice Age. While trying to catch up with them, the accident-prone Sid gets on the wrong side of a group of rhino-like Brontotheres and has to be saved by Manny (Ray Romano), a solitary, sarcastic mammoth who is going against the current and travelling north. Meanwhile, the sabre-toothed squirrel Scrat is trying desperately to bury his acorn.
Much to his annoyance, Sid decides to tag along with him, and on their journey they pass a woman who has jumped into a waterfall in order to protect her son from a sabre-toothed tiger attack. She has just enough strength left to entrust the baby into their care, and the duo decide to track down the rest of the child’s family and return him to them. However, a sabre-toothed tiger named Diego (Denis Leary) has been commanded to kill the baby as an act of revenge, and when he crosses paths with Sid and Manny, he hatches a plan to trick them. What he doesn’t count on, though, is bonding with this unlikely duo and their charge, and eventually he will have to choose between his new friends and his old tribe.
Gone Nutty (2002, short film)
This Academy Award-nominated short focuses on Scrat’s acorn-loving antics and picks up straight after the events of Ice Age. The squirrel seems to have finally found the perfect spot to hide his most precious possession – until it all goes wrong, and Scrat and his stash go into freefall.
Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)
Sid, Manny and Diego are living in a valley encompassed by a huge ice wall – or so they think. The wall is actually a dam that is barely managing to hold back a vast body of water, and when it breaks, the valley will be engulfed and left nearly a mile underwater. According to a vulture, there is a boat at the other side of the valley that could provide them with a way out, but they have just three days to reach it before the dam will burst.
While on their quest, the gang meet a female mammoth named Ellie (Queen Latifah). Manny thinks he might just have found ‘the one’ – until he learns that Ellie is convinced that she’s actually a possum and travels with her two “brother” possums Crash (Seann William Scott) and Eddie (Josh Peck). Sid, meanwhile, gets his moment in the spotlight when he encounters a tribe of mini-sloths who treat him as a god. Will he join them or stick with his old pals – if they make it out of the valley in time?
No Time For Nuts (2006, short film)
While once again trying to search for a place to stash his acorn, Scrat ends up excavating a time machine which takes him (and his acorn) on a journey through the eras, from the Middle Ages to ancient Rome and on to revolution-era France and the Wild West.
Surviving Sid (2008, short film)
In his new guise as a camp counsellor, Sid takes a group of school children on a camping trip. With this accident-prone sloth in charge, what could possibly go wrong?
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)
With Manny and Ellie expecting their first child, Sid worries that he will be left behind by his friends and, in a bid to have a family of his own, steals three dinosaur eggs. When their mother, a Tyrannosaurus rex, comes looking for them, he refuses to return the babies, prompting her to carry Sid and the youngsters into a subterranean world filled with dinosaurs previously thought to be extinct.
Manny and co follow Sid underground where they meet Buck (Simon Pegg), a one-eyed weasel who is hunting down a fearsome dinosaur named Rudy to get revenge on him. Meanwhile, Scrat the sabre-toothed squirrel falls in love, but can his new romance overcome his enduring fixation on his beloved acorn?
Scrat’s Continental Crack Up (2012, short film)
Think of this as a brief prequel to Ice Age: Continental Drift. Scrat reckons that an ice cap would be the perfect spot to hide his acorn, but when it starts to crack beneath him, he foolishly attempts to fill the gap, which only makes matters worse.
Scrat’s Continental Crack Up Part 2 (2012, short film)
In the second instalment, we see Scrat suffering the consequences of his foolishness as he drifts through the ocean on an ice float and spots the evil Captain Gutt and his crew, who will be introduced in Continental Drift.
Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012)
16 years on from the events of Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Manny is far too protective of his now teenage daughter Peaches (Keke Palmer), who is driven away by his mollycoddling. Scrat is still attempting to bury that acorn, but this time, his efforts have major consequences, causing the ice to break up. Manny, Sid, Diego and Sid’s Granny (Wanda Sykes) are stuck on a moving fragment that is swept away from Ellie and Peaches in the current.
While they are floating away from land, they are captured by a group of pirates led by the villainous Captain Gutt (Peter Dinklage). The group must fight to escape their clutches and try to find their way back home, but Diego’s feelings are thrown off-balance by Shira (Jennifer Lopez), the first mate of Gutt’s crew.
Cosmic Scrat-tastrophe (2015, short film)
This time, Scrat’s acorn-burying antics catapult him into space in an abandoned rocket, triggering an asteroid attack.
Ice Age: Collision Course (2016)
Ellie and Manny are gearing up for Peaches’s upcoming wedding to a mammoth named Julian, but their preparations are marred by the fact that Manny doesn’t rate his future son-in-law at all, despite his daughter’s entreaties for him to get to know Julian better. Scrat’s quest for the acorn has thrown him into the stratosphere and sent asteroids rushing to Earth, nearly wiping out Manny and co in the process.
In a bid to ward off another similar attack, the gang, along with Buck, venture to Geotopia, a sealed-off community of immortal creatures found inside an asteroid that fell to earth many years before. Here, they meet characters like the yoga-loving Shangri Llama (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and Brooke the sloth (Jessie J), who falls in love with Sid.
Scrat: Spaced Out (2016 short film)
Still stuck in space, Scrat is captured by Scratazons, the extra-terrestrial counterparts to the sabre-toothed squirrel, who steal his acorn. Can he get it back from them and avoid being sucked into a black hole?
The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild (2022)
When possum brothers Crash and Eddie leave the herd’s camp in a bid to prove that they can survive without their friends’ help, they end up finding the entrance to the Lost World, a land where dinosaurs still roam. Here, they bump into their old pal Buck, who tells them that a Protoceratops named Orson (Utkarsh Ambudkar) is trying to take control of the dinosaur world.
They’ll have to team up with some of Buck’s old dinosaur-hunting friends, as well as Momma Dino, the T-rex whose children were briefly adopted (or kidnapped) by Sid in Dawn of the Dinosaurs, in order to ward him off. Aside from Pegg, who reprises his role as Buck, the sixth Ice Age movie features an entirely different voice cast.
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