Cars, while a good film well-received, is probably Pixar’s weakest project to date. As a franchise though, it’s one of Pixar’s strongest – the merchandise that spawned from the film has provide billions of dollars. You may not have consciously realised it, but there is a hell of a lot of Cars merchandise all over the place.
We all know that Pixar are currently working on a sequel to Cars which should provide the opportunity for the next shed-load of merchandise to be manufactured. But MovieLine seems to know something we don’t: Pixar are supposedly producing a direct-to-DVD spin-off titled Planes.
It’s going to be set in the fictional Radiator Springs like Cars and Cars 2, but obviously it’s going to feature aeroplanes instead. It’ll give Pixar a chance to create a surplus of merchandise which, if all goes to plan, will net them a lot more money. The direct-to-DVD choice is an odd one – Pixar have yet to do this before (not without lack of trying though) and it’s definitely an area more favoured with Disney.
Could Planes be Pixar’s first bad film? Direct-to-DVD features have the tendency to be low on quality and while Pixar produce consistently high-quality films the ideas of a spin-off to Pixar’s worst film doesn’t sound particularly inviting. Pixar have turned a corner recently – before Toy Story 2, Pixar didn’t make sequels. Now we have a third Toy Story film in cinemas, a Monsters Inc. sequel planned for a 2012 release and two Cars sequels in production. The glass half full side of me is assuring the glass half empty side that Pixar have yet to go wrong and both Toy Story sequels were a success.
There is one film being developed by Pixar that isn’t a sequel: Brave is set for 2012 and sees a Scottish princess wanting to be an archer.
