Disney has been steadily rolling out live-action remakes of its films over the past decade, but Pixar won’t be taking the same approach going forward.
Back in 2014, Disney began remaking some of its classic animated films, starting with its Sleeping Beauty adaptation Maleficent. It quickly abandoned that alternative vision in favor of mostly straight remakes with at least one new song added for its Oscar submission, but the bulk of what Disney has done has been making commercially successful but critically underwhelming films. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like a live-action remake of a Pixar film will be happening anytime soon, as Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter expressed no interest in doing so in a recent interview with Time magazine.
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Time Magazine revealed to Docter that The Contenders star Josh O’Connor couldn’t stop talking about his love for Ratatouille during the tennis film’s press tour, and that fans are launching a campaign to have O’Connor star in a live-action remake of the cooking rat movie. When asked if Pixar would consider a live-action adaptation, Docter was blunt: “No, and this may be embarrassing for me to say, but it bothers me a little bit. I like to make original, unique movies. To remake it, it doesn’t make sense to me personally.”
Responding to a Time magazine comment on how to make a live-action mouse lovable, Docter continued: “It’s hard. A lot of the things we create only work because of the rules. [animated] world. So if a person walks into a floating house, your mind is like, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The house is super heavy. How are the balloons holding it up?’ But if there’s a cartoon character standing in the house, you’re like, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ The world we’ve built is very hard to translate.”
It’s a reassuring sentiment, though Docter also said that part of Pixar’s strategy is to “try to balance our output with more sequels,” so even if he says he wants to make original films, that’s not entirely true. After all, the completely unnecessary Toy Story 5 is coming soon, and Inside Out 2 opened this week, so sequels seem to be Disney’s focus right now.