Incredibles 2 finally landed this summer, a whole 14 years since the first Pixar superhero movie, and it seemed that audiences everywhere were definitely ready for it. Earning over $1.2 billion worldwide, it currently stands as the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year. You can bet that Disney would love to push forward with a spinoff, then, but we wouldn’t bank on it happening any time soon.
The reason why is because writer/director Brad Bird has made clear that he’s not into the idea of jumping into another film set in the Incredibles universe. While speaking to IGN, Bird explained that he thinks there are many options to develop offshoots from I2 – he suggested the Wannabes, in particular – but it’s not his personal wish to make one as he believes there’s too much of “the same stuff” in the movie business at the moment.
Obviously, Incredibles fans would be all over, say, a shared universe similar to Marvel, but you can’t fault Bird’s argument against that sort of idea. Looking at the rest of the top 5 highest-grossing releases of the year, for example, they’re all sequels – a bunch of Marvel movies and Mission: Impossible – Fallout, to be precise. Even though he could clearly make a big fat paycheck out of an Incredibles spinoff, it’s admirable that Bird doesn’t just want to milk his creations dry.
That’s why it took so long to put together Incredibles 2 in the first place. Bird’s said that he never wanted to make a sequel for the sake of it and so it wasn’t until he found a story for the second movie that hooked him that he moved forward with the project, no doubt to Disney’s delight. It was initially meant to arrive in 2019, remember, but production was going smoothly enough that it was bumped a year forward.
While he might be against a spinoff, though, Bird has explained that the truncated production schedule did mean that he didn’t get time to work in some ideas he really liked into Incredibles 2, which he’s said he could potentially return to in a third film. Going by the gap between the first two, though, we should probably expect that to arrive in cinemas in 2032.