Pixar has announced their next three movies, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Cars. Hit the press release for more info.
The deal with Pixar and Disney is this – Pixar has a contract with Disney that, at this point in time, obliges them to three more movies by 2005, thus the announcement. One of the stipulations for them is that sequels don’t count towards the totals, so we won’t be seeing a Toy Story 3, unless there’s still some demand for it in 2006. Toy Story 2 was originally going to be a direct to video sequel – despite the fact that Toy Story took four years to produce, the logic was that Toy Story 2 would take considerably less time since most of the assets (like the characters and the software) already existed. However the movie/plotline proved to be “too damn good” so they went the extra mile and made it a full blown film, released in 1999. Toy Story came out in 1995 and A Bug’s Life came out in 1998, so at that point there must have been two “teams” working within Pixar. My guess would be that the Bug’s Life team turned around and did Monster’s Inc. for release in 2001. It’s somewhat representative of Moore’s Law that the technology in the films can improve while the turnaround time dwindles, but I would imagine Pixar must have three teams right about now.
Finding Nemo doesn’t have a date yet but the plan is for The Incredibles to come out in 2004 and Cars (my bet is the title changes – A Bug’s Life was originally Bugs) to hit in 2005. In order to work on three films more or less concurrently (Cars is going to have Lasseter back at the helm, so it doesn’t sound like it could be turned around in two years) is to have three teams. Come 2005 they’ll either renew their contract with Disney on better terms (sequels for starters) or venture off on their own.
The movie Shrek was fine and all, but I thought it was more of a fart joke than a film – and it sure as hell wasn’t Oscar worthy. Final Fantasy went to the other extreme – near photorealistic graphics and a horrible story. The recent film Ice Age was a decent movie but the graphics looked to me like a student working on a resume film – they didn’t do it for me like a Pixar film does. And as for that Jimmy Neutron movie? How in the hell did that one even get nominated? The crappiest Quake modification looks better than that.
Pixar hasn’t let me down yet – let’s try to keep it that way, shall we?