Will Pixar Ever Create Its Own Cinematic Universe? Here’s What ‘Finding Dory’ Director Andrew Stanton Thinks

Because of the box office success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, most other studios in Hollywood are now looking to replicate this set-up with their own universe of interconnecting movies.

Over at Universal they’re set to launch the Monster Universe next year with The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise, which will hopefully eventually crossover with The Invisible Man, Wolf Man, Van Helsing, Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Bride Of Frankenstein, while Warner Bros. have the DC Extended Universe, and Legendary Pictures are looking to crossover King Kong and Godzilla, as well as numerous other mythical monsters, too.

But what about Pixar? Sure it sounds like a bit of an absurd idea at first, but when you consider that it’s the home to Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo, which are some of the most beloved franchises in the history of cinema, you can immediately picture just how lucrative that might be.

Director Andrew Stanton was quizzed by Movies about a potential Pixar universe while out promoting the home entertainment release of Finding Dory, and while he admitted that there’s no such plan at the moment he didn’t completely rule it out.

“Not yet. I’m sure if the idea was good enough…look, we’re game for anything,” Stanton freely admitted. “It’s not like we want to repeat ourselves. People have asked if we’d want to do something episodic or something more mature, but it would be a horrible reason to do it if that’s the motive. Hopefully you always have a great character story idea and then the format of how you would do it follows. That would be the desire.”

This then provoked Andrew Stanton to insist that the only reason Pixar would ever oversee such an interconnecting universe would be if it benefited the “character and story” of their films.

“You’re just making a product if you’re doing it for any reason other than character and story. And we have yet to have an idea or character story that demands we do a crossover. But I’m telling you, the second something seems to support that, we would do it.”

Currently, Pixar have a rather full slate of films in production, with sequels to both Toy Story and The Incredibles on the horizon. However, toward the end of October, the studio announced that these films would be switching release dates, with Incredibles 2 now coming out on June 15, 2018, and Toy Story 4 being released on June 21, 2019.

This provoked concerned reaction from Pixar fans, but Andrew Stanton insisted to Cinema Blend that there is no reason to be concerned, as they’re making sure not to rush the films to completion so that they’re as good as they can possibly be.

“There’s no big conspiracy about anything, even though I know that would be juicy,” Stanton explained. “The truth is that every time we develop films, we always have five or six films privately that we’re in the middle of developing. We’ve learned over time to make them like magnets, because what we want to be respectful for is whether the stories are ready or not.

“So we end up, for economic reasons, we end up having to announce sometimes when a film might be released, but then we go, ‘Wait a minute, we want more time on the story to really nail it.’ So if we find that another film on the stove is going well, and we can move it up, then we do a swap, so there’s no more drama than we just want to get the stories just right… It’s always been like that. I think if we had our way, we would never announce our slates, period, until we were done so that we don’t create phantom drama.”

[Featured Image by Pixar]