Pixar’s suburban superheroes set for sequel at last
Still, for Bird, “The Incredibles” — which vaulted him to success after the box-office failure of his critically lauded 1999 directing debut, “The Iron Giant” — has always held a special place in his heart. “The most fun experience I’ve had yet making a movie was the first ‘Incredibles,’ ” he said. “It seems on the outside like a really hyper-commercial movie, but it’s strangely personal to me. It’s all the stuff I liked blended in with my own family, who I love. It’s got its own flavor.”
The original “Incredibles” had seemed tailor-made for a sequel, ending on a cliffhanger in which the Parrs prepare to do battle with a new baddie called the Underminer. As the years went on and no follow-up seemed to be on the horizon, many fans were perplexed.
“People were asking, ‘Where is it? How come you guys haven’t done another one?’ ” Nelson said. “I think in Brad’s head it was just a question of: How are you going to tell the story? What’s going to be the hook here?”
Bird had actually concocted the initial germ of a sequel around the release of the first film, with a story that would see Helen pushed to the forefront of the action while Bob stayed home with the kids.
But while Bird was aware that executives at Pixar and its corporate parent, the Walt Disney Co., were eager for him to make a follow-up, for years the project remained only half-formed. “The rest of the story — the sort of superhero plot part — was always, unendingly shifting,” he said. “It almost wore me out as a writer because I kept having to redo it to get it balanced.”
Hunter says at a certain point the notion of a sequel fell off her radar. “I wasn’t tracking it,” she said. “I just kind of felt like if something was going on, we would know about it. And something wasn’t going on for so long that I stopped thinking that it ever would. I mean, 14 years is a long time.”
Complicating the challenge was the fact that, in the wake of “The Incredibles,” the cinematic landscape had changed dramatically, as superhero films began sucking up an evergrowing share of the oxygen in Hollywood.
“When we made ‘The Incredibles,’ there were only two active superhero franchises: ‘X-Men’ and ‘SpiderMan,’ ” Bird said. “Otherwise it was a pretty clear field and pretty green and watered and not too tromped on.” He laughed. “Right now it’s a dried-up soccer field that’s got giant gopher holes in it, you know? So it’s a different thing to coax life out of.”
Rather than stuff the sequel with more eye-popping spectacle, Bird thought, it was better to keep the focus squarely on the core strength of the franchise: its characters.
“If people have a planet exploding in one movie, they try to have three planets explode in the next one — and it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. “That’s not spectacular. What’s spectacular — and very hard to do — is make people care. I love great special effects as much as anybody. But it’s hard to worry about a fireball if you don’t care about the person running from it.”