Pixar Is Making More Sequels

[Mickeyfan1990]

Sometimes a sequel isn't bad if done right like Lasseter said, but in today's day and age, a sequel is now cause for joy or alarm (though I don't like to think that sequels are made to make a quick buck). Incredibles 2 and Cars 3 let's wait and see. And always, this is coming from someone who want a Roger Rabbit sequel/prequel.

[Sotiris]

Now, focus has returned to Pixar, enduring what is arguably the worst year in the studio’s history. Certainly, Pixar’s three most recent releases – 2011’s Cars 2, 2012’s Brave and 2013’s Monsters University – have been met with lukewarm critical responses. They’ve also been accused of an over-reliance on sequels – a fact compounded when, halfway through this interview, Disney announce Pixar will soon start work on Cars 3 and The Incredibles 2.

“We have tried to work out – with difficulty – the balance between original films and sequels,” admits Catmull, with a sigh. “The problem is some of our riskier films just don’t make as much money. But if you only make films that will just be commercially successful, then you can also sink yourself as a studio. So in order to maintain the artistic integrity of the studio, we try to make sure that at least two thirds of our films are original. Believe me, sequels are just as hard to make as original films. So it isn’t about that.”

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/pixa ... rview.html

[Fflewduur]

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/pixa ... rview.html

Nice read--thanks for that.

[estefan]

Why do the Pixar people keep saying that the reason for the sequels is because their original films aren't successful? Every single one of Pixar's films have been very successful. Their last film to make less than $500 million at the box-office was Cars and that one can still be considered a sizeable hit, even without counting the billions in merchandise sales.

[Fflewduur]

Why do the Pixar people keep saying that the reason for the sequels is because their original films aren't successful? Every single one of Pixar's films have been very successful. Their last film to make less than $500 million at the box-office was Cars and that one can still be considered a sizeable hit, even without counting the billions in merchandise sales.

Nowhere does Catmull say any of the films have been "unsuccessful." He says the riskier films don't make as much money.

It's all about context. It's not a universally, monolithically true statement by any stretch, but generally speaking...

Brave made a little less than half of Toy Story 3. 2 of the top 3 all-time Pixar earners are sequels. Over the past decade, Up is the only original film to break $700 million worldwide; over that same time, Brave, Ratatouille, and WALL*E are three of the poorest performers, particularly in domestic BO. There are outliers--Up is #3 in domestic and #4 in worldwide box office returns, and Cars 2 fares poorly (its saving grace is international BO because domestically it didn't even sell as well as Toy Story, which was made a decade and a half earlier on a fraction of the budget). 2 of their top 5 earners are original films at least a decade old; more recent, more expensive original films have simply have not fared as well.

[estefan]

Well, over at DreamWorks right now, they're wishing their original films were making even close to the amount of money Pixar's original films are pulling in (Rise of the Guardians just barely squeaked past $300 million and Turbo didn't even reach that total). So it comes off as a little greedy when the folks at Pixar are saying their films aren't making enough money.

[Warm Regards]

It's the rich-girl-gone-middle-class syndrome - any impressive amount of cash you make now will seem like peanuts, especially if in the past you made a billion dollars. (Wonder what this bodes for Disney post-Frozen...)

[Fflewduur]

Well, over at DreamWorks right now, they're wishing their original films were making even close to the amount of money Pixar's original films are pulling in (Rise of the Guardians just barely squeaked past $300 million and Turbo didn't even reach that total). So it comes off as a little greedy when the folks at Pixar are saying their films aren't making enough money.

Catmull says riskier projects don't sell as well, which is not the same as "the folks at Pixar are saying their films aren't making enough money."

Rise of the Guardians resulted in a massive write-down and hundreds of layoffs for DreamWorks; I don't feel that "greedy" is the most appropriate adjective to characterize the desire to avoid such consequences. (Mr. Peabody and Sherman isn't going to help them much, either, from the look of the returns.)

And DreamWorks isn't doing much to help themselves or the state of the market, in my opinion. They're putting out 2 and three films a year; while I've seen rather few of them, their quality standard doesn't measure up to Pixar's. And their sum total of franchise films alone, which are their most successful films--Megamind, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, Puss in Boots, with How to Train Your Dragon soon to be added to the list--matches Pixar's total output. Their willingness to saturate the market and to franchise more successful titles have done as much as anything to create an environment in which original films become riskier projects.

[Lady Cluck]

The Dreamworks slump is the greatest thing to happen to animation in YEARS. Nearly all of their films are utter shit, even the "good" ones which get too much credit just for not being mindnumbingly awful like 90% of what they put out.

Unfortunately they have a lot of sequels coming soon that will likely be big hits, but like Shrek, those can only last so long before they're overexposed and the public moves on. I doubt Turbo will be their next big franchise.

Regardless, I will continue to pray every night for more financial ruin for them!


As for Pixar, I will continue to have faith in them. Out of their 14 films so far, three are among my favorite films of all time, six I love immensely, four I like, and one I don't really care for. That's not a bad track record at all!

[estefan]

What kind of person roots for people to get laid off? Because that's exactly what happened to a lot of talented animators after Rise of the Guardians and Turbo underperformed. Regardless of how you feel about their films, rooting for them to fail (and as a result leading to good, hard-working and talented people getting fired and jobless) is pretty sick.

[Fflewduur]

The Dreamworks slump is the greatest thing to happen to animation in YEARS. Nearly all of their films are utter shit, even the "good" ones which get too much credit just for not being mindnumbingly awful like 90% of what they put out.

...

Regardless, I will continue to pray every night for more financial ruin for them!

I wouldn’t go quite that far, myself—I’d rather animators have work than not (having suffered a bout of long-term unemployment, I can attest that it’s horrible and soul-crushing), and it’s just an unfortunate fact that staff that do the actual *work* tend to be the first to take the hit when business goes bad.

I had higher hopes for DreamWorks when the partnerships with Aardman was still in effect. Even now, the Aardman films are among the best-received projects released under a DWA banner…but those weren’t actually *made* by DreamWorks anyway.

I’ve got kids, so the films are hard to avoid, but the ex and I have an informal Disney/Pixar-v-DWA-and-everything-else distribution agreement whereby I miss most of those films in theaters and have precious few on hard media in my collection. The first Panda movie isn’t terrible, nor is HTTYD; the latter is the only DWA film that’s had any real staying power with my kids, except for Puss in Boots. I’ve utterly avoided the films that look the least appealing, and I’ve seen only a handful of them in total, but they tend to lack heart, and they tend to be missing some ephemeral element that makes them truly *special*. I kinda hate Antz, I despised the Shrek projects I saw (except for Eddie Murphy), and pretty much everything else has just seemed eminently forgettable. For whatever reasons, even my least-favorite Pixar films are more endearing, more memorable, and carry more more weight.

Of Pixar’s newly-announced sequels, Cars 3 is actually the one I’m most interested in. Bringing back The Incredibles with Brad Bird at the helm seems like a no-brainer—I have no doubt it’ll be good. But Cars was the first Pixar film I missed—intentionally—in the theatre; when I finally saw it, it was a far better film than I’d expected. (I confess I even teared up once we got to James Taylor singing Randy Newman’s paean to changing times.) The second film isn’t as good and has more problems, but I’d still rather watch it again than anything DreamWorks has done. But the franchise hasn’t done terribly well, financially *or* critically, and the trend has been downwards: Cars 2 didn’t make back its budget in domestic release, it was the first Pixar film to fail to receive a single Oscar nod, and it’s easily the poorest-reviewed feature they’ve produced. Going back to make a third film seems even riskier, in context, than mounting a new original project…so I have to wonder *why*. And it makes me think that John Lasseter is bent on redeeming the series—in which case it could wind up being the best of the three.

[Lnds500]

Well, over at DreamWorks right now, they're wishing their original films were making even close to the amount of money Pixar's original films are pulling in (Rise of the Guardians just barely squeaked past $300 million and Turbo didn't even reach that total). So it comes off as a little greedy when the folks at Pixar are saying their films aren't making enough money.

Well.. duh!

They are comparing everything to TS3 much like Disney compared everything to TLK (and from now on, Frozen).

Disney started the sequel madness near the launch of their most successful film (at the time) as well.

We saw how both of these turned out.

What kind of person roots for people to get laid off? Because that's exactly what happened to a lot of talented animators after Rise of the Guardians and Turbo underperformed. Regardless of how you feel about their films, rooting for them to fail (and as a result leading to good, hard-working and talented people getting fired and jobless) is pretty sick.

A biased one?

HTTYD and KFP are as good as Pixar's good films. Shrek was amazingly original at the time of its release as well. They just milked it to death (but I like both the second and third outings).

[disneyprincess11]

In other news:

Upcoming Pixar ‏@upcomingpixar 2m

Also, Lee Unkrich's next film is referred to as "Untitled Lee Unkrich Film" rather than "The Untitled Pixar Movie About Dia de los Muertos."

Uh oh, looks like Book of Life made Pixar drop its plot.

[Fflewduur]

Well.. duh!

They are comparing everything to TS3 much like Disney compared everything to TLK (and from now on, Frozen).

Again--to the best of my knowledge. no one at Pixar is complaining that their films aren't making enough money. They're simply acknowledging that, given the current state of affairs, original projects are financially riskier. And I don't think it's reasonable to infer that anyone anywhere is necessarily gauging success by the performance of record-breaking films: from what's been said about the project, no one at Disney expected the kind of success Frozen has enjoyed; given the underwhelming performance of Cars 2 and that the difference in domestic gross between Toy Story and TS2 didn't even make up for the expansion in budget between those two films, I imagine Pixar was painfully aware that TS3 could have tremendously underperformed as well.

The commitment to sequels notwithstanding, it feels to me like Pixar is still more concerned (to at least as concerned) with quality as with quantity and marketability. Inside Out is clearly a chancy venture, and not I could ever see getting past the pitch stage at DWA.

Disney started the sequel madness near the launch of their most successful film (at the time) as well.

And I regard that as a dark time. But I'm grateful, at least, that the company wasn't throwing all its money and talent into those projects and making them theatrical releases. Less than a third of the current top ten highest-grossing animated features are original films, and for *that* we can thank DWA, Blue Sky, and Universal/Illumination. (But of the top 5, 2 each belong to Disney and Pixar--and only one of them is a sequel.)

HTTYD and KFP are as good as Pixar's good films. Shrek was amazingly original at the time of its release as well. They just milked it to death (but I like both the second and third outings).

I still don't think they're as good as Pixar's *great* films. And personally I don't see what marked Shrek as especially original. The meta-pop-culture-reference thing was done much earlier (and much better) in Aladdin (and through one individual's inspired and improvised madness much more than Shrek's author-by-committee). The most unique I saw in Shrek was its wholesale enthusiasm for scoring points by taking in-joke shots at another animation studio; it's the most mean-spirited family animated feature I've ever seen.

[Lady Cluck]

HTTYD and KFP are as good as Pixar's good films. Shrek was amazingly original at the time of its release as well. They just milked it to death (but I like both the second and third outings).

LMFAO!!!!!!!! Not even close honey. I do like the KFP movies but that's the most ridiculous praise for them I've EVER heard.

And Shrek is utter shit and one of the most overrated films of ALL time. Seriously.

[Disney's Divinity]

It is ridiculous. For all their flaws, I'd say KFP and HTTYD are better than several Pixar films and the majority of Disney's CGI films.

[Sotiris]

John Lasseter and Jim Morris talk about the criticism Pixar received for making sequels.

John Lasseter: “When any other company has a hit it madly starts developing a sequel to capitalise on it. We don’t. We only start developing a sequel when we have an idea that’s good enough.”

Jim Morris: “The sequel thing is always interesting to me. There’s a cynicism about sequels, but audiences love them. And if you ask anyone they’ll usually have a couple of sequels in their top 10 favourite films. The Godfather II, the second Star Wars movie…”

John Lasseter: “Steve Jobs always said the way people feel about your brand is like a bank account. You can make deposits or you can make withdrawals. A deposit is when everything that comes out bearing your studio’s name is really great. A withdrawal is putting out something you know isn’t as good as it should be. We refuse to do that.”

Jim Morris: “If you look at it we’re pretty pitiful at exploiting the possibility of sequels. Finding Dory is coming out 10 years after Finding Nemo! [With] Cars 3 we wanted to wait until we had an idea. We’re not conforming so well to the Hollywood sequel model.”

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to ... toy-story/

[Prince Edward]

I love how Lasseter and Pixar seems to be in complete denial regarding their newfound love for sequels and their supposedly special place as the only studio who put "story" before "money". "No, no, we are nothing like the other (animation) studios in Hollywood who loves to make sequels. We need a great idea first. Ah, yes, Cars 3!"

[ce1ticmoon]

It's true that most of their sequels are coming out 10+ years after the previous films (TS3, MU, FD, I2), and even TS2 and Cars 2 had 4 and 5 years, respectively, and in that sense, I guess they can make the argument that they haven't conformed to the usual Hollywood model for sequels. And I'd be willing to buy that argument if they had higher than a 50% success rate with their sequels, but as it stands, MU and Cars 2 were not even remotely in range of their predecessors in terms of story quality. And not only were they subpar stories, but they failed to show us why these stories needed to be told. There's a reason their fans are wary of the sequelitis they have contracted as of late, and they shouldn't act otherwise. If all four of their upcoming sequels are hits, though, I am more than willing to change my tune and simply regard the last two as misfires. Though as of right now, the only one I'm really confident in is The Incredibles 2, since I've never been disappointed by Brad Bird. (Though I haven't seen Tomorrowland yet, which seems to be considered by many as his first misfire.)

[disneyphilip]

I love how Lasseter and Pixar seems to be in complete denial regarding their newfound love for sequels and their supposedly special place as the only studio who put "story" before "money". "No, no, we are nothing like the other (animation) studios in Hollywood who loves to make sequels. We need a great idea first. Ah, yes, Cars 3!"

Stop it with the accusations and misunderstandings!