With Finding Dory out in U.S. cinemas and Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and The Incredibles II all on the horizon over the next few years, Pixar president Jim Morris has been discussing the studio’s approach to sequels, as well as revealing that there are no plans at present for follow-ups to Ratatouille, WALL-E and Inside Out.
“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,” Morris tells EW. “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 continues. “Pete Docter [who directed 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. “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.”
Speaking about Pixar’s current run of sequels, Morris added that: ““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.”
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Originally published July 3, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
