Pixar boss: No more sequels planned

In a move that Hollywood could/should take notice of, the boss of Disney’s animation behemoth Pixar has said that sequels are now on the back burner for the studio.

OK, so it has to get ‘Cars 3’, ‘Toy Story 4’ and ‘Incredibles 2’ out of the way, as they’re already in production, but once that’s done, it’s back to a focus on original storytelling.

“Most studios jump on doing a sequel as soon as they have a successful film, but our business model is a filmmaker model, and we don’t make a sequel unless the director of the original film has an idea that they like and are willing to go forward on,” Pixar president Joe Morris told Entertainment Weekly.

“A sequel in some regards is even harder [than the original] because you’ve got this defined world which, on the one hand, is a leg up, and on the other hand has expectations that you can’t disappoint on.”

“Everything after Toy Story and The Incredibles is an original right now,” he added of Pixar’s forthcoming slate.

“Pete Docter [director of Inside Out] has an original idea for his next film. Brad Bird, being the director of ‘Ratatouille’, is working on The Incredibles and we haven’t really spoken about [a sequel to] that. And WALL-E is close to my heart since I produced it,” he went on.

“It would be good to back and visit that world and let everybody know that the humans actually survived again after getting back to their burnt-out planet. But that was really a love story that had its beginning, middle, and end, so we’re not really planning any further stories in those worlds at this point.

“Our plan had been to make an original every year and a sequel every other year, if the idea came forth to do it.

“If we add the next films after the current ones, it actually comes out to exactly that: seven sequels in a spate of 21 originals, from the time we were acquired by Disney [in 2006].

“So it’s penciled out to be the same portfolio, just not in the order we thought they would be. And a lot of that has to do with when Andrew had a sequel idea, and Brad had a sequel idea… sometimes that’s just how it happens.”

Pixar has Lee Unkrich’s ‘Coco’, inspired by the Mexican holiday Día de Muertos, due for 2017, ‘The Incredibles 2’ for 2018, ‘Toy Story 4’ for 2019, and two so-far untitled movies for 2020.

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