Last month, during Disney’s rapturous D23 event, the studio arrived guns blazing in the animation department, presenting a host of films arriving in the next two-to-three years for wide-eyed attendees. Perhaps the more interesting trend, though, was the balance between sequels and original properties, with the likes of The Good Dinosaur and Zootopia rubbing shoulders with Toy Story 4 and Brad Bird’s long-awaited Incredibles 2.
The general feelings toward each sequel could be surmised in single phrases, with apprehension lingering over the return of Woody, Buzz and Co. and genuine excitement for Bird’s sequel. Does that ensure that the director’s follow-up has secured its status as a sure-fire hit? Certainly not, and Bird is well aware about the potential hurdles facing Incredibles 2 on its long and winding path to the big screen.
According to the man himself, the film’s script is about “three-quarters” done, and the animated sequel has drawn back much of the creative talent that worked on the 2004 original.
Speaking to Collider, here’s what Bird had to share.
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. 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.
Arriving more than a decade after the first Incredibles picture, the superhero genre is now an altered landscape, with an near-overwhelming amount of live-action genre films slated for release in 2016 and beyond. Brad Bird is well aware of that fact, though, and the director has said that retaining the spirit of the first film is the ultimate end goal.
But 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.
Incredibles 2 is currently without a release date, though as soon as Brad Bird nails down the script, we can then look forward to seeing the first signs of life from Pixar’s long-in-development sequel.
