Pixar Boss Shoots Down Hopes of Live-Action Remakes

The person in charge of Pixar doesn’t see the company’s movies getting the live-action treatment. If there’s one thing you can say about Disney, it’s that it has found success turning its animated projects into live-action feature films. Some recent examples include Cruella, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Jungle Book. However, Pixar has a proven formula for creating original properties with compelling stories. And while fans would be interested in seeing Pixar make live-action adaptations, the Pixar boss is firmly in the “Nope” camp. 

Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter was the focus of a TIME profile, where he was informed about actor Josh O’Connor’s love of Ratatouille – the movie about a rat with big dreams of becoming a chef in Paris – and the fan campaign to get him cast as the film’s Alfredo Linguini. When asked if Pixar would ever consider live-action adaptations, Docter replied, “No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me. I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”

When the topic of making a live-action rat cute, Docter added, “It would be tough. So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world. So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’ But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”

Inside Out 2 director has ideas for a third movie

As we near the release of Inside Out 2 this week, the film’s director is already plotting what a sequel would look like. The new Pixar sequel follows Riley as a teenager, as emotions like Anxiety and Embarrassment make their way into her head. The film will feature new locations in Riley’s brain as well, but there were still plenty of ideas that didn’t make the cut. That’s the biggest reason why director Kelsey Mann is hoping for an Inside Out 3.

“I love this world. It’s such a great world to play in, and ideas just kind of come from playing in this world, both for locations and characters,” Mann told ComicBook ahead of the Inside Out 2 premiere. “There’s so many ideas not only from the first film, but especially in this one, where I’m like, ‘That’s a really fun, clever idea. I don’t know how it fits into this particular story, but it should be used at some point.’”

Mann went on to offer some details about one of the ideas that was ultimately scrapped from Inside Out 2. The concept was a park called Procrastination Land that was always under some sort of construction and never completely ready to open. 

“One of my favorites is a location that we came up with called Procrastination Land,” the director continued. “This is the land I definitely have, especially as a teen. It was a land which had a big sign that said ‘Procrastination Land’ and then it said ‘Coming Soon.’ And Anger was like, ‘When are they gonna start building that place?! It just keeps sitting there!’ They haven’t made any movement on it. It’s such a funny idea. We had trouble figuring out why in this particular story. I won’t tell you everything about it, there’s some other stuff about it that’s really funny. So I’m like, ‘This has to be used somehow in the future.’”

Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out 2 arrives in theaters on June 14th.