“I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves,” Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter explained.
With Pixar’s latest release Inside Out 2 dominating the box office, one of the award-winning animation studio’s executives says the studio has no plans to ever reimagine its movies in a live-action format.
“No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me,” Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, recently told Time, after he was asked whether Pixar may consider adapting its older movies in a live-action format.
“I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves,” Docter, 55, said. “To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
Docter is credited as the director of Pixar classics like Monsters, Inc., Up, 2015’s original Inside Out and Soul. He has also worked on the animation or story for many of Pixar’s hits over the last 30 years, including the first two Toy Story films and 2008’s WALL-E. His comments regarding Pixar’s potential to remake their movies in a different format came after Time asked about Challengers actor Josh O’Connor, a self-proclaimed fan of Pixar’s 2007 film Ratatouille whom fans have clamored to star in a live-action adaptation.
“It would be tough. So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world,” Docter explained. “So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’”
“But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it,’” he added. “The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
While Docter said Pixar has no plans to adapt any of its films for live-action, its parent company Disney, which bought the studio in 2006, has seen significant financial success in recreating many of its classic animated films in live-action settings in recent years. 2023’s The Little Mermaid remake ranked among the highest-grossing films of last year, and a live-action version of The Lion King succeeded similarly in 2019, among other releases stemming from Disney’s catalog of cartoon classics.
Inside Out 2 is currently the second highest-grossing movie of the year at the domestic box office.
