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To balance finding the next Inside Out and making the next Inside Out, PIXAR has a new formula for originals & sequels now
Every other movie the studio puts out will probably be a sequel, so expect more adventures with the Toy Story and Incredibles coming soon.
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You could argue that Pixar is returning to the sequel well a bit too often. Between Inside Out 2 bringing in over a billion dollars at the box office and Toy Story 5 and The Incredibles 3 on the way, it is clear that Pixar and Disney have found success with sequels, but they also say they’ve found the right balance to also focus on their original films like 2025’s Elio.
The tricky thing about making animated movies the way Pixar does is that it takes a very long time – more than five years each, according to Pete Doctor, Pixar’s chief creative officer. “We have to find out what people want before they know it,” he explained during an interview. “Because if we just gave them more of what they know, we’d be making Toy Story 27.”
Of course, the company is currently producing its fifth Toy Story movie, so there is certainly an element of dipping into familiar territory too often. But even that is a calculated effort to help mitigate some of the risks inherent in the moviemaking process. The pattern that Pixar has adopted appears to be one original film followed by a sequel, which is why they followed up the billion-dollar-grossing Inside Out 2 with their latest movie, Elio.
“It takes as much work and effort to make something that doesn’t make money as it does for something that does,” Doctor opined. “And you can’t really plan on this stuff. Sometimes you just hit the right little combinations of things.”
That pattern seems to hold up as we look ahead at what Pixar has on their production slate. Of the five announced films from the studio, three are sequels to previous hits.
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