Onward Director on Sequel Opportunities

With Onward winning over the hearts of moviegoers in theaters with its Pixar Animation Studios charm this weekend, the world brought to life through the voices of Tom Holland Chris Pratt has been enriched with plenty of opportunity for expansion. Onward‘s world called for an abundant amount of detail-oriented building ranging from naming magical spells to details on the sides of houses to look both magical and urban. The process to create the movie took director Dan Scanlon and his Pixar team seven years to fully realize. If a sequel were to come along, it would likely take the same amount of time, if not longer.

“We’ve been so focused on this movie,” Scanlon told Comicbook.com in 2019 on the Pixar campus in northern California. “There’s lots of stuff that we love that we had to cut, which will hopefully be in the deleted scenes.”

Those deleted scenes might be the closest thing fans get to a a sequel. “Hypothetically it would take another seven years,” Scanlon said.

Such a process has been evidenced in the past with Pixar. Monsters Inc. and Monsters University told stories with the same characters but released 12 years apart. “We did Monsters University and that was the same deal,” Scanlon explained. “The problem is always the story, it has to be a good story or we’re not going to do it. And that’s what the majority of that time is, is just rewriting the story, putting it up on storyboards, watching it again. And sequels are hard too, because you’ve got to come up with a whole new adventure for them and a whole new arc for them.”

If the opportunity presented itself with another personal, emotional story with just the right magic, Scanlon would be game to bring Holland’s Ian and Pratt’s Barley back into the movies. “I’d love a really well done sequel, but they’re tough,” he admits.

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Onward is now playing in theaters.