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The Incredibles was made in 2004. In the ending it was clearly shown that Pixar is going to make a second part. But Incredibles 2 appeared only in 2018, after 14 years. What caused such big delay? Was it just because Pixar was busy with making other movies?

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    The toughest question for any sequel is "Are you sure your v2 is not a v1.2 actually"? Or as we say "same stew but more cloggy". The less time is between the releases, the more chances you're doing v1.x siblings, not solid sequels. Even so nice & cute "Ice Age" series is about 3-4 years between the releases, not faster. Jan 29, 2019 at 12:42
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    Perhaps a more clear title for the question would be Why was there a 14 year gap between The Incredibles and The Incredibles 2. Currently, you could read this as if they actively started making the movie, and it took 14 years to complete, which AFAIK is not the case.
    – BruceWayne
    Jan 30, 2019 at 18:01
  • This is tagged production. Forget the title. The better question is why it took a producer 14y to offer millions of dollars to a movie maker to make a sequel with (I'm guessing, more or less) full creative rights. It was now or never.... Preferably never.
    – Mazura
    Jan 30, 2019 at 20:10
  • It's a conspiracy. Incredibles 1 never existed. The stills from that movie that people still use as proof of the existence of "Incredibles 1" were all made on a secret stage in Hollywood. And just look at that CGI quality. Generate that kind of pic before the age of the iPhone? Fake I say! Jan 30, 2019 at 21:11

3 Answers 3

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For writer-director Brad Bird, it all came down to story.

“The thing is, many sequels are cash grabs,” Bird told reporters during a recent press event to promote Incredibles 2. “There’s a saying in the business that I can’t stand, where they go, ‘if you don’t make another one, you’re leaving money on the table.’ It’s like, money on the table is not what makes me get up in the morning; making something that people are gonna enjoy a hundred years from now, that’s what gets me up. So if it were a cash grab, we would not have taken fourteen years – it makes no financial sense to wait this long – it’s purely that we had a story we wanted to tell.”

Bird admitted that the proliferation of superhero properties in recent years has made it much harder to tell an original story; the first film debuted before Pixar’s parent company, Disney, purchased Marvel, and predated Iron Man by four years - meaning that the new film is entering a very different cinematic landscape from its predecessor.

There's a fair bit more in the source article

Why Did Incredibles 2 Take So Long? Brad Bird Explains the Sequel's Delay

Some of which also relates to multiple rewrites concerning the villain storyline and trying to make I2 more unique in an ever-proliferating cinema-scape of super-hero movies.

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    I haven't clicked through to the link. Based on the quoted response, it's not that Incredibles 2 was always planned and took 14 years to make. It's that 14 or so years went by without the director feeling the need to make a sequel. Is that the right takeaway for your answer?
    – ArrowCase
    Jan 28, 2019 at 17:29
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    @Snow There's a big difference between the director considering plots for a sequel and the (faulty) premise of the question ("it was clearly shown that Disney is going to make a second part"). A sequel wasn't planned, but they of course left the door open for one.
    – jamesdlin
    Jan 28, 2019 at 23:57
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    @Mazura Pixar was (and still is) famous for their official position of never making sequels to any of their movies. Toy Story 2 was their first exception and it was only made because they found a compelling story to tell. It has since been their position of never making any movie without a compelling story to tell. Pixar never plans on making sequels. If there is a sequel it is basically a happy coincidence. Of course, one might expect that under Disney they may change and to a small degree they have a bit. But what happened is that Disney is now run by former Pixar execs.
    – slebetman
    Jan 29, 2019 at 3:50
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    I'm not sure that Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, and Incredibles kind of negates the "never plans on sequels" story. A quick glance at the Cars wiki shows that Lassiter was planning Cars 2 while promoting the first movie.
    – user43022
    Jan 29, 2019 at 8:11
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    Cars is a little different in that it was basically a cash grab, a departure from Pixar's norm. IIRC, Lassiter's sons loved toy cars and he realized how gigantic the market was for such a movie and related merchandise. Jan 29, 2019 at 20:40
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The ending of The Incredibles was never meant as a pointer to a sequel. As Brad Bird — who wrote and directed the movie — told CinemaBlend:

How did that Pixar adventure end? The family was leaving Dash's track meet, when suddenly, a former nemesis -- The Underminer (John Ratzenberger) -- bursts out of the pavement and declares war. But, in an exclusive interview, Bird told CinemaBlend that this wasn't always his planned ending, and he explained:

I had another ending that was kind half baked, meaning not really finished in my mind. And I knew that the way to classically end a film is show people getting back in the saddle and riding off into the sunset. But I resisted a little. And finally, my head of story on that film, a guy named Mark Andrews, said, 'Come on, you know what you want!' And I was like, 'All right, all right.' So I thought, it's a way of showing they're together, and that they're going to face whatever obstacles as a group, now embracing their superpowers. So I thought that's what was important to communicate.

I wouldn't have set it up so everyone wonders who The Underminer is. No, no. It was just, this will be a satisfying ending to this film. And if there's never another one, we get that the family's together, they're embracing their powers, and they're fighting whatever obstacle comes their way.

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    "In the ending it was clearly shown that [Pixar was] going to make a second part." The Underminer? What a joke. That was just a way to end the movie. Please tell me that's not what the second one is actually about....
    – Mazura
    Jan 29, 2019 at 18:47
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    @Mazura It is not, it moves on quite quickly from there. Jan 29, 2019 at 20:37
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    +1 For that opening line, and addressing the real problem: The entire premise of the question is wrong, based on a misunderstanding of the ending.
    – Wipqozn
    Jan 31, 2019 at 13:38
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much like the first film, Incredibles 2 will explore "the roles of men and women; the importance of fathers participating; the importance of allowing women to also express themselves through work, and that they’re just as vital as men are. And there’s aspects of being controlled by screens. There’s feelings about the difficulties of parenthood, that parenting is a heroic act." – Interview with director Brad Bird

14 years is how long it took their target audience's children to have kids of their own. That was necessary for the new audience to appreciate the movie... and of course: extra ticket sales.

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  • I assume they didn't want to ruin a new IP with a story they didn't have yet. The writer says they were 'laying down tracks in front of a moving train'. But why they could get away with it 14y later... this.
    – Mazura
    Jan 28, 2019 at 17:32
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    "Pixar was (and still is) famous for their official position of never making sequels to any of their movies. Toy Story 2 was their first exception and it was only made because they found a compelling story to tell. It has since been their position of never making any movie without a compelling story to tell. Pixar never plans on making sequels. If there is a sequel it is basically a happy coincidence. Of course, one might expect that under Disney they may change and to a small degree they have a bit. But what happened is that Disney is now run by former Pixar execs." – slebetman
    – Mazura
    Jan 29, 2019 at 18:48
  • Not sure from when this quote is, but we have Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters University, Finding Dory and now Incredibles 2. 6 out of 20 movies are sequels, quite far from 'never'. And touting Toy Story 2 as their first exception is also strange, as it is 3rd film they made, after Toy Story and A Bug's Life. Jan 30, 2019 at 11:57
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    Toy Story 2 is the only 'exception' on that list, no matter how many of anything anyone made.
    – Mazura
    Jan 30, 2019 at 16:17
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    Note that Pixar only really started to do sequels in the past decade or so. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films The Incredibles is from an era during which a sequel was an exception.
    – BCdotWEB
    Jan 31, 2019 at 14:25

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