Wow, this is shocking if you ask me. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times (via Hypable) Andrew Stanton was asked about his upcoming project, Finding Dory, which is a sequel to the 2003 smash hit Finding Nemo. In it he essentially says it’s not a film Pixar actually wanted to make, but for business reasons it will soon exist.
Here’s the quote:
“There was polite inquiry from Disney [about a Finding Nemo sequel],” says Stanton, also a vice president at Pixar. “I was always ‘No sequels, no sequels.’ But I had to get on board from a VP standpoint. [Sequels] are part of the necessity of our staying afloat, but we don’t want to have to go there for those reasons. We want to go there creatively, so we said [to Disney], ‘Can you give us the timeline about when we release them? Because we’d like to release something we actually want to make, and we might not come up with it the year you want it.'”
Stanton is coming off the lackluster success of John Carter at Disney and added, “It’s more often that somebody fails at a sequel than they succeed… You don’t want it to be derivative or redundant.”
These quotes almost hurt as you can tell Stanton is less than interested in making this film. The “I had to get on board” and “we’d like to release something we actually want to make” lines say it all as far as I’m concerned and makes me wonder just how much passion the Pixar folks can have for a film they don’t really want to make. It also makes me question just how instrumental Disney was when it comes to the Toy Story sequels and this year’s Monsters University. While the Toy Story sequels are often considered superior to the original, were they products of Disney brass or were they projects the Pixar Animation team also supported?
In terms of upcoming films I assume the folks at Pixar actually want to make you have Peter Docter‘s Inside Out, Bob Peterson‘s The Good Dinosaur and Lee Unkrich‘s untitled 2016 film that delves into the vibrant holiday of DÃa de los Muertos.
Finding Dory is currently slated for a November 25, 2015 release and takes place about a year after the first film, and features returning favorites Marlin (Albert Brooks), Nemo and the Tank Gang, among others. Set in part along the California coastline, the story also welcomes a host of new characters, including a few who will prove to be a very important part of Dory’s (Ellen DeGeneres) life.
Do Stanton’s quotes give you any pause when it comes to the potential for the upcoming sequel?
