As Disney Pixar’s Hoppers bounds towards the biggest box office opening weekend for an original animated movie since the studio’s own 2017 effort Coco, the guardians of the Luxo lamp are already turning their eyes to future projects. Just a couple of days ago, during a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal, company Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter offered some fresh updates on a bunch of Pixar movies that are heading our way — including a hitherto unannounced but now confirmed Monsters, Inc. 3 and two fresh new original offerings that certainly have our ears pricking up.
On the Monsters, Inc. front, there’s really no news beyond the confirmation that a third Monsters movie — following in the footsteps of 2001’s Billy Crystal and John Goodman starring classic and its 2013 prequel Monsters University (plus, on the small-screen, Disney+ spin-off Monsters At Work) — is indeed in active development, with no directors/writers/stars attached just yet. More intriguingly perhaps than a welcome but also fairly unsurprising comeback for fan favourites Mike and Sully however are the two original movies mentioned in WSJ‘s piece.
First up is Ono Ghost Market, which is set to become Pixar’s third animated odyssey into the afterlife following Coco and Soul. No director or writer has been confirmed yet, but the movie is set to draw upon “Asian myths about supernatural bazaars where the living and dead interact.” The other is the next movie from Turning Red director and Elio co-director Domee Shi, who’s rapidly becoming one of Pixar’s leading lights. Plot details on the film are being kept hush-hush for now, but we do know that the movie’s going to be a first for Pixar — the studio’s first fully fledged musical. (Sadly, ‘Put That Thing Back Where It Came From Or So Help Me’, great as it is, doesn’t qualify Monsters, Inc. as a musical, folks.) Both of these movies join the 5 March, 2027 dated, Enrico Casarosa directed Gatto in Pixar’s original movie pipeline.
Elsewhere in the WSJ piece, Docter also outlined Pixar’s plans to release Incredibles 3 in 2028 and Coco 2 in 2029, which — along with this summer’s imminently arriving Toy Story 5 — means we’ve got seven Pixarian pictures in all currently on the slate and on our radars to look forward to now. If Hoppers is anything to go by, then a new golden age for the trailblazing studio may well be about to begin. Fingers crossed, folks!
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WSJ
