It’s nice to wake up on a Monday morning to some good news.
Word broke a while ago that Disney was working on moving ahead with creating a third sequel to the popular Disney/Pixar CGI Toy Story films. However, due to the currently strained relationship between the two companies, Disney would be doing this third film entirely on their own and without Pixar’s involvement, as they hold all the rights to the property under the terms of the current agreement between the two studios.
Few, if any, of the people I know thought this was anything remotely close to a good idea, given Disney’s current inability to produce anything of quality and tendency to pump out cheap direct-to-video sequels to their classic films in lieu of any real creativity. The only animated films that have come out of the Disney empire for the past few years that have really been worth seeing have been the Pixar collaborations, and Disney trying to continue a Pixar success sounded like nothing but trouble.
Apparently, though, my friends and I weren’t the only ones to feel that way, as Disney is having problems finding anyone willing to sign on to the Toy Story 3 project.
No one wants to direct ‘Toy Story 3.’
That’s the word in Hollywood’s animation world, where the third installment of the incredibly successful Pixar series has no director, writer or, possibly, stars.
My sources in the animation biz tell me that Disney, which will make ‘Toy Story 3’ without Pixar, cannot find a director to guide the project.
[…]
Disney has the right to make sequels to all the Pixar movies it distributed, including ‘Toy Story,’ ‘The Incredibles,’ ‘Finding Nemo,’ etc. But there’s a hitch — since Pixar developed all the animation materials to create the movies, it also gets to keep them.
In other words: Disney is now trying to hire another team of animators to recreate Buzz Lightyear, Woody and all the other ‘Toy Story’ characters so that they look the same. It will have to start from scratch to reproduce Pixar’s creative work.
The next step, of course, is to find a writer and director for the project. With Lasseter gone, my source says, “Every single animator of note has turned down the director’s job. They don’t want to cross Pixar. They’ve become the only deal in town.”
Good news, indeed!
(via Luxo)
“Heresy” by Rush from the album Roll the Bones (1991, 5:25).