There was much excitement back in March of last year when the official word broke that Brad Bird and Team Pixar were at work on a sequel to **The Incredibles. We’ve had to wait for much of an update, what with Bird busying himself making this year’s Tomorrowland, but now he has spoken to Collider about his progress on the new movie.
Talking at an event for the new Signature Edition release of The Iron Giant, Bird offers that he’s working away on the script but that, as with many animated projects, the team is already taking things to the next level. “I have the story arc. I’m probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we’re already boarding parts of it,” he says. “I’ve got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we’re all having a good time with it.”
He was naturally reluctant to reveal much in the way of plot, but he did say that he’s aware of the changed landscape in terms of superhero movies and how he plans to respond to our Marvel and DC-heavy era. “What’s changed is there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there’s a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don’t want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we’re trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us. But we’re having a good time.”
As for when we’ll see the film? That’s also up in the air, but in a positive development, it appears things are going well. “We were originally — Incredibles was supposed to happen after Cars, and our wheels just happened to click a little earlier so they moved us up. Release dates are a little fluid when you’re making films so far in advance. Some films are tougher to come together and tough nuts to crack, and other ones comes together a little more quickly, and so I’m just going to work as fast as I can work well with a relatively small team because I like small teams better until you’ve got everything firmly figured out.”
Next up from Pixar is The Good Dinosaur, which lumbers on to our screens on November 27.