However, it seems the combination of the Curb Your Enthusiasm team and Baron Cohen, along with the project's relatively low budget of $65m, may have been too much for studios to resist.
Years of straightening out other people's singing have clearly given Pharrell too much exposure to studio perfection: he seems to have fed his own vocals through the autotuner.
Dreamworks' psychedelic caveman caper The Croods is gorgeous to look at and has a strong voice cast, but owes way too much to the studio's brilliant How to Train Your Dragon and that movie's incisive depiction of a collision between wide-eyed, hopeful youth and fearful middle age.
"It is difficult for me to reveal too much as my studio practice can yield different and unexpected results.
As so many producers try to do too much in the studio these days, it's the simplicity of this track that makes it work so well.
Nor has Disney tinkered too much with Marvel Studios, a 2009 purchase, allowing the company to continue its five-year build towards this summer's ensemble comic book flick The Avengers, which duly went on to post a staggering $1.5bn at the box office to wide critical acclaim.
"If people thought it was a rather over-the-top performance, they were right," he said, saying that he was acting too much for the live studio audience, and that things would be different in series two.
I get annoyed now thinking of all the extra time I could have spent in there with her but didn't, maybe because I was hanging out with some girl or spending too much time in the studio, because being in that hospital room with Amy were some of the most magical times we ever had.
They laughed behind his back at his healthy lifestyle and new age obsessions, drank and drugged too much in the rehearsal studio and were still content to jam on old Aerosmith riffs when Rose was trying to introduce them to DJ Shadow and Nine Inch Nails.
"It's not fun to spend too much time in the studio alone.
