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Disney has been steadily putting out live-action remakes of its films over the past decade, but the same treatment isn’t in Pixar’s future.
Back in 2014, Disney began its trend of remaking some of its classic animated films, starting out with the Sleeping Beauty retelling Maleficent. It kind of abandoned that alternate perspective angle quite quickly, instead just going for mostly straight remakes with at least one new song added so they can submit something to the Oscars, but for the most part all the house of mouse has done is produce commercially successful but critically poor films. Thankfully, it doesn’t sound like Pixar films will be getting any live-action remakes in the near future, as in a recent interview with Time, chief creative officer Pete Docter expressed disinterest in them.
Docter was informed by Time that Challengers star Josh O’Connor had been talking about his love for Ratatouille on the tennis film’s press tour nonstop, and that there’s a fan campaign for O’Connor to star in a live-action remake of the cooking rat movie. When asked if live-action adaptations are something Pixar would ever consider, Docter said quite bluntly, “No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me. I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
In response to a comment from Time questioning how you’d make a live-action rat cute, Docter continued, “It would be tough. So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world. 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.’ The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
This is a reassuring sentiment, though Docter did also say that part of Pixar’s strategy is “to try to balance our output with more sequels,” so even if he says he wants to make movies that are original, that isn’t quite true. After all, the wholly unnecessary Toy Story 5 is on the way, and Inside Out 2 is out this week, so it seems like sequels are the big focus for Disney at the moment.