Taking a break from his work on Incredibles 2, Brad Bird has been doing the publicity rounds for the upcoming rerelease of his first animated film The Iron Giant in a one-night special presentation on September 30. But that doesnt mean he doesn’t want to talk at least a little bit about his newer work.
Speaking with Collider, Bird gave an update on the screenplay in development for Incredibles 2 and dropped a hint or two as to how the film will stand out on a release schedule filled with superhero films.
I have the story arc. I’m probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we’re already boarding parts of it. I’ve got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we’re all having a good time with it…
But what’s changed is there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there’s a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don’t want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we’re trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us. But we’re having a good time.
But as to when we will see this sequel to arguably one of Pixar’s greatest films, Bird was a bit more circumspect. He cited how the development process at the animation studio works as to why there has been no date announced for an Incredibles 2 premier.
In terms of the release date, we were originally — [The original] Incredibles was supposed to happen after Cars, and our wheels just happened to click a little earlier so they moved us up. Release dates are a little fluid when you’re making films so far in advance. Some films are tougher to come together and tough nuts to crack, and other ones comes together a little more quickly, and so I’m just going to work as fast as I can work well with a relatively small team because I like small teams better until you’ve got everything firmly figured out.
