‘Incredibles 2’ Director Reveals Alternate Story Ideas

14 years after Disney and Pixar won over the hearts of audiences with The Incredibles, writer/director Brad Bird is delivering a sequel into theaters.

Incredibles 2 tells a very different story than the original, sending Elastigirl into the action, and leaving Mr. Incredible to take care of the kids. However, Bird says that the ideas that came to fruition in this movie weren’t always the ones he had in mind.

While speaking to CinemaBlend after the Incredibles 2 premiere, Bird admitted that he approached Pixar with a much different sequel than the one hitting theaters this weekend.

“The idea that I got greenlit, like, ‘Okay, ready to go,’ we didn’t end up using,” Bird explained. “It involved A.I. and all kinds of stuff. And then there was another idea that had more of a show-business bent to it that really had a lot of great ideas in it, but it wasn’t enough stress on the family to make it so that it was… it made them shallow. And so we wound up with the story we wound up with, which had little bits of the other stories, but it just kind of went its own way.”

As Bird continued, he explained that it was fellow Pixar director Andrew Stanton who helped point him in the direction for the final product.

“There was a pivotal screening, maybe a year and a half in, a collection of scenes, but the big note from it was, and I think this was Andrew Stanton’s, in order to get Helen out on the mission, stakes have to be higher,” he said. “There has to be a reason; there has to be a really strong reason for her to do that. And that was like, ‘Mmhmm, yup. That’s right.’ Responding to that was what pulled the movie into where it is now.”

The overall plot of the film wasn’t the only major piece of Incredibles 2 that Bird changed throughout production. Later in the interview, the director noted that, just like with Syndrome in the first movie, Screenslaver wasn’t originally the planned villain.

“I realized just recently, like last week, that it was kind of like the first movie, because The Incredibles was the only movie that was formed outside of Pixar, and then brought to Pixar. Like, ‘You guys wanna make this?’ And I came to them with a different villain on the first movie. When we did an alternate opening that we ended up not using, we got a new villain out of it that we all preferred to the one that I came to Pixar with. So Syndrome and Buddy Pine was actually a late arrival to the original movie, and that was what happened with this one with Screenslaver.”

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Incredibles 2, written and directed by Brad Bird, is set to hit theaters on June 15.