Sequels, sequels, sequels… Apparently the mark of creative stagnation.
Even more so with animation, even more so with the supposedly too-holy-for-sequels Pixar… The very studio that wasn’t allowed by the company they were once in a contract with to make sequels. Oh yeah, did you ever miss those fine details? On how Pixar’s original contract with The Walt Disney Company in the 1990s and early 2000s stipulated that every movie they make in-house had to be an original story? For the purpose of giving Disney new characters and worlds for their theme parks? I bet many did, given the way people fret about Pixar making sequels. In speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, their current CCO (Chief Creative Officer) and Soul director Pete Docter recently spoke about the abundance of Pixar sequels released this past decade, and did say that more could be made for financial reasons. For the purpose of having a little safety net and funding for original works, in case one of those original works is to fail at the box office. (The Good Dinosaur is their only original film to truly lose money on its theatrical release, Onward was cut right off by the pandemic so it shouldn’t be in this particular criteria, while Cars 3 barely doubled its budget.) In this climate, a big animation studio might not be able to survive on originals and originals alone. Unless they’re a special case, like LAIKA, with all that shoe money…
Walt Disney Animation Studios didn’t make a feature film sequel until 67 years after the place was founded by brothers Walt and Roy O. When it came to animated features, Walt Disney was sequel-averse, and the studio held onto that tradition until the Michael Eisner era. But the Eisner era’s attempt at getting the studio to break that old tradition didn’t go over well, so the company instead opted to have smaller studios produce direct-to-video sequels and follow-ups to Disney animated features instead. Only one exception was made for nephew Roy E. Disney’s pet project, Fantasia 2000… and this way of running the show was a thing until Eisner’s successor Bob Iger installed two Pixar heads at the studio that produced these much-contested DTV films (Disneytoon Studios), said chiefs put a stop to them. What did this mean? The original studio was now going to make sequels to their films. 2011’s Winnie the Pooh was made in-house at WDAS, after several years of Pooh films being made by Disneytoon. Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen II being announced certainly gave folks a scare, but with the historical context, it all makes sense. How could a studio that was “too good” for sequels start making sequels on a more regular basis? Disney and Pixar were never too good for sequels… The animated feature was never inherently an anti-sequel medium.
At least, in most of the Western world.
Walt had his views with making sequels. For his animated features (not counting the economic wartime package films that sometimes featured characters from previous favorites), a new story was to be taken on each time out. Ya know, “you can’t top pigs with pigs”? With live-action, the rules were not so stringent. Walt bypassed sequels by occasionally making pictures that revisited elements of popular hits of his. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty revisit the fairy tale princess so Walt didn’t have to make a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs continuation. In a pre-home video age, re-releases of that film and the others were more than enough to keep those stories going. After the smash success of Lady and the Tramp in 1955, Walt opted to make another dog picture, that was One Hundred and One Dalmatians. Then he sought to make a cat picture in a similar vein as well, giving it the go-head before his passing; that film was The Aristocats. Almost any and all continuations would be throughout tie-in products, like comic strips and such. There would also be the occasional short film featuring a character from a movie, too. Only two other major animation studios in the United States got to making features like Walt was, but their plans went south. The Fleischer Studio tried with Gulliver’s Travels, which did pretty well enough in 1939, but the studio went under for a multitude of reasons, which left their second and last feature – Mr. Bug Goes to Town – to rot. The UPA made their feature debut with their one and only Mr. Magoo, in 1959’s 1001 Arabian Nights. But they didn’t last past two features, either. Gay Pur-ee opened in 1962, two years after the release of their final few cartoon shorts. The UPA’s animation division was folded by 1970.
While more animated features started to crop up and hit theaters by the mid-1960s from various outlets, sequels still weren’t a thing. That was, until 1972, when Snoopy, Come Home was released, a follow-up to 1969’s acclaimed Peanuts adaptation A Boy Named Charlie Brown. The film, unlike its predecessor, was a box office dud. Two years later, a sequel to Ralph Bakshi’s controversial and game-changing Fritz the Cat was released. Made without Bakshi’s involvement, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat also sunk at the box office and didn’t at all leave the kind of impact the original did. The Peanuts made two more appearances on big screens during this period, with Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown in 1977, and Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) in 1980. Neither made much of a splash at the box office.
Of course, animation fans and historians may regularly call the 1970s and early 1980s the “dark age” of American animation. Certainly, a new feature was a gamble. At Walt Disney Productions, each movie had to do well, if not… The animation division could’ve been shut down. They faced this uphill battle even before Walt’s passing. The box office disaster that was Sleeping Beauty lead to the bean counters and Roy O. Disney imposing massive restrictions on the unit shortly thereafter, perhaps a compromise. MGM had similar feeling towards short films, especially their lucrative Tom & Jerry series. A sort of “why make more of these when we can just re-release them every once in a while and keep making money off of them?” Territories across the Atlantic in particular said otherwise, they wanted new animated features and new cartoon shorts. This is why some of those Golden Age studios kept going into the 1960s, because there was still a market for these kinds of films, somewhere. The European markets, no surprise, were quite good to Disney in the aftermath of the studio’s downsizing, and after Walt’s death. Those post-Jungle Book films in the 1970s made excellent money overseas, in addition to solid domestic returns. Did you ever know that The Rescuers outdid Star Wars in West Germany and France?
So at the end of the 1970s, you have a studio whose animated feature unit is miraculously afloat whose leaders are also hanging onto its deceased founder’s hesitance to make sequels, everyone else is merely trying to get one feature even made. Otherwise, it was imports that had the potential to do well here. With the Peanuts sequels and Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat failing, maybe studios were advised to not make sequels to animated features. It was unusual to not see a follow-up to Ralph Bakshi’s quite successful Middle Earth adaptation The Lord of the Rings, but behind-the-scenes circumstances and perhaps a lack of funding prevented the intended second film from happening.
Some folks, such as myself, pin the beginnings of American feature animation’s 2nd Golden Age in the year 1986. First, you have Walt Disney Feature Animation returning to relative safety after The Black Cauldron‘s less-than-stellar performance the year before. The new heads of the company entertained the idea of ceasing animated feature production, but in the summer, the small-budgeted The Great Mouse Detective made a decent profit. With that and Roy E. Disney’s efforts, animated features were here to stay. After all, the projects that would later become Oliver & Company and The Little Mermaid, were pitched and greenlit shortly after Jeffrey Katzenberg’s arrival to Disney in early 1985. But the real reason 1986 was the launchpad was because of the success of Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg’s An American Tail, whose record-breaking box office run during the holidays sent a major wake-up call to Disney heads. Animation could make good money again, and that the woes of the early 1980s did not necessarily mean that audiences weren’t interested in animated features.
Also in 1986 came… A sequel, the first Western animated feature sequel since Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown. That was The Care Bears Movie II, which didn’t do half as well as the original did the year before. The original managed to outgross The Black Cauldron by a hair (much to the dismay of many a Disney staffer), the sequel flat-lined. Was it because the Care Bear fad was over by 1986? Or was it because the parents who took their Care Bear addict kids to theaters to see the first one didn’t feel the need to pay money for round two? (One of my aunts always told me a funny story about how she was a babysitter in the mid ’80s, and she took the kids she looked after to see The Care Bears Movie when it was released. She always told me that she wanted to put a bullet to her head throughout… She must’ve felt the way Grandpa Lou did in that Rugrats episode.)
What else happened in 1986? The then-new Disney heads asked the animation division what their highest-earning film was. When they learned that it was The Rescuers, a sequel was put into pre-production. The Rescuers Down Under, as we all know, did poorly at the box office when released in fall 1990. Once again, it seemed like Walt Disney had a point when it came to sequels. Other animation studios struggled with sequels, so did Disney with this new Rescuers adventure. Steven Spielberg set up Amblimation after splitting with Don Bluth, and the house’s first feature was the sequel to his successful Bluth collaboration. An American Tail: Fievel Goes West opened against Beauty and the Beast in 1991. You could say the immense popularity of the Disney hit was what killed Fievel Two, but I suspect that interest in an American Tail sequel might not have been there in the first place. Either that, or Disney quietly played dirty behind closed doors and made sure that the film didn’t stand a chance. After all, they would go on to outright murder The Swan Princess.
It seemed like nobody got it right. The Don Bluth-less sequel saga continued with All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 in 1996, but the original had trouble in theaters, so it was inevitable that the sequel would as well. Universal, seeing how Fievel’s Goes West did, sent all future American Tail and Land Before Time movies straight to video. The Swan Princess II managed to get a limited theatrical release, but to say it didn’t make a dent is an understatement.
Toy Story 2 changed everything upon its 1999 release… and almost completely by accident.
That contract. I’ve gone over it a ton of times, because a lot of people on the internet deserve a handy guide as to why Pixar went on an utter sequel binge this past decade. The stipulations of that original contract is a big explanation. As such, after Toy Story erupted at the box office, The Walt Disney Company wanted a sequel ASAP. In early 1996, it was commissioned as a direct-to-video feature produced by a B-team studio, under director Ash Brannon. Pixar focused almost entirely on A Bug’s Life, but everyone was so satisfied with where the story was going on Woody and Buzz’s next journey, that Toy Story 2 was upped to theatrical status. When it appeared that the story was in very rough shape less than a year away from release, Pixar took it over completely at the main building in Point Richmond with John Lasseter and Lee Unkrich now directing alongside Brannon. It’s the legendary turn-around story; everyone worked overtime to steer that ship away from the maelstrom. Toy Story 2 was not only critically acclaimed, but it was the first animated movie sequel to outgross its predecessor. Toy Story 2 was, at the time, among the higher-grossing animated films. $485 million worldwide put it behind The Lion King ($768m, its total before its 2002 and 2011 re-releases) and Aladdin ($504m).
Of course, Eisner and co stuck to the letter of the contract. Sequels would not count as part of the extended picture deal. Steve Jobs felt otherwise. The gentleman’s agreement between both entities stipulated that Disney would not pursue a sequel to a Pixar film without the Pixar team’s permission. This inevitably lead to problems, and it blocked a third Toy Story from moving forward in 2000. So Pixar kept pitching and making original pictures for the time being.
Meanwhile, Disney made the baffling decision to put a few Disneytoon pictures into theaters: The Tigger Movie, Return to Never Land, Piglet’s Big Movie, The Jungle Book 2, and Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. Suffice to say, they didn’t make much of a mark… Thus, they were going to stay direct-to-video.
So, in the early 2000s, the two major animation studios are both sequel-averse. Disney Feature Animation doesn’t do sequels in reaction to how The Rescuers Down Under performed (though makes a slight exception for Roy E.’s Fantasia 2000), Pixar can’t make them because those won’t count towards their contract with Disney. Most of the other studios failed to turn out hits throughout the 1990s to turn into theatrical sequels, even a fairly successful hand-drawn animated feature from the period (such as Don Bluth’s Anastasia) wouldn’t be granted a theatrical sequel. Throughout the 1990s, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, Universal, et al. couldn’t compete with standalone movies. Warner Bros. tried with another live-action/animated Looney Tunes hybrid with Looney Tunes: Back in Action in 2003, but it bombed at the box office. Paramount, however, scored a record-breaking hit with the Nickelodeon adaptation The Rugrats Movie in 1998. Two years later, Rugrats in Paris debuted theatrically and did pretty well for what it was, even if it didn’t match the amount of money the first movie made. Rugrats Go Wild, a 2003 crossover with Klasky-Csupo’s other Nick hit The Wild Thornberrys (and a sequel to the 2002 Wild Thornberrys movie), bombed.
Enter DreamWorks.
DreamWorks Animation, co-founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg in 1994, entered the animation ring with Antz and The Prince of Egypt in 1998. However, 2000’s The Road to El Dorado went belly-up at the box office, while their Aardman collaboration Chicken Run did rather spectacularly. DreamWorks didn’t have a picture that either did well enough to warrant a sequel, or necessarily called for one. They too went the direct-to-video route that Disney, Universal, et al took, and made the Prince of Egypt spin-off Joseph: King of Dreams. That all changed with the runaway success of Shrek in the summer of 2001, a sequel was announced in no time. Disney and Pixar were leaving a void in animated sequels, so it made sense that DreamWorks – without any of this weird history – tried… A year later, 20th Century Fox scored a hit with Blue Sky’s prehistoric comedy Ice Age. Inevitably, a sequel was announced months later… Could these two CG comedies score hit sequels?
Shrek 2 came out in 2004 and utterly changed everything. That’s an understatement. Shrek 2 was a goliath box office success, and for a long while held the crown for highest-grossing animated feature of all-time. Several more Shreks were in the pipeline now. Your chances of seeing a sequel to Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas were slim. (Though ironically, the former lives on through a TV series and a movie based on said TV series… Nearly 20 years later…)
While Shrek 2 roared at the box office, Disney and Pixar were beginning to have some serious sequel squabbles, thus began the short Circle 7 Animation saga. The Walt Disney Company looked to be losing Pixar, so their heads went back on that gentleman’s agreement and began green-lighting Pixar sequels that would be made without their respective creators. After all, that contractual agita had both parties sitting on a goldmine. A new Toy Story or a new Monsters, Inc. or a new Finding Nemo were sure to be as successful as Toy Story 2 and Shrek 2.
Things eventually worked out in the end, and by the time the now-Disney-owned Pixar announced that they were in control of a third Toy Story film set for a 2009 release, Blue Sky had released Ice Age: The Meltdown. The 2006 sequel surpassed its predecessor at the box office, and made a big chunk of change internationally. Meanwhile, Pixar also quietly began work on a Monsters, Inc. follow-up. DreamWorks had a second Madagascar movie lined up in addition to their many planned Shrek follow-ups, the next of which – titled Shrek the Third – debuted in spring 2007 and made beaucoup bucks.
So sequels were still very much a DreamWorks thing, and Blue Sky inevitably had more Ice Age coming, and once in a while you’d get something like the VeggieTales movie sequel (2008’s The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything)… Disney ended direct-to-video animated sequel production in 2006, with the final set of films then in-production being released from the end of 2006 to the beginning of 2008. Disneytoon re-routed with a troubled Tinker Bell feature, and the heavily-overhauled film – more or less a disconnected, standalone CGI animated prequel to Walt Disney’s Peter Pan – eventually debuted on disc at the end of 2008. Now, all Walt Disney Animation Studios needed was a picture that was successful enough to warrant a sequel made in-house. We weren’t going to get a sequel to one of their early aughts films, that was for sure… or their first all-CG picture Chicken Little. Nothing from the previous administration. 2007’s Meet the Robinsons – significantly overhauled in the transition after the acquisition, unfortunately, was not very successful. Maybe the dog movie set for the following year would be that?
April 2008… In addition to having Toy Story 3 in production and penciled in for summer 2010 (moved there after Up surged ahead in development), Pixar announced that they were making a sequel to their 2006 hit Cars, with a vague summer 2012 release frame attached to it. Within months, that changed to a concrete date in summer 2011. I remember the reaction a bit. It was alarming for some, curious for others… The more positive response was something to the tune of “Well, they must have a great idea for it if they are making it. Remember, Toy Story 2 turned out fantastic!” This was also the same year the franchise amassed $5 billion in global merchandising sales. I’m sure that was already a massive concern for the more skeptical folks out there, and those who firmly felt that the first Cars was Pixar’s first (and then only) misstep. The year ended with DreamWorks releasing their Madagascar sequel to, as expected, strong box office results. The studio’s Kung Fu Panda was a surprise break-out earlier in the summer, the studio’s biggest non-sequel film since Shrek. A sequel was immediately on the slate.
By 2010, most of the big studios had at least one hit that made them confident in pursuing theatrical sequels. Sony, after putting out a direct-to-video Open Season sequel in 2008, finally had a good-sized hit in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; the sequel was up and ready to go. Warner Bros. saw a big hit with Happy Feet, and dutifully set up a sequel. DreamWorks had more Shrek, Po, and the Madagascar gang on the way. Illumination dashed right out of the gate with their summer smash Despicable Me, with a sequel in the works. Pixar had announced a second Monsters, Inc. film, and took the highest-grossing animated movie record with Toy Story 3 – the first all-animated film to gross $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Only Disney Animation wasn’t working on one, but they were merely surviving after being dragged into the ground a few years earlier. Bolt and The Princess and the Frog only did so-so despite strong critical reception and Oscar chances. Tangled was a big hit internationally, but the gross barely covered the over-budgeted picture. Successful enough to be considered a hit, but not enough for a part two.
The sequel age was upon us. Until the mid-March day in 2015 that Disney Animation happily announced that a sequel to their 2013 mega-smash Frozen was in the works, we saw plenty of sequels, spin-offs, prequels, and other continuation installments of popular animated hits. Soooooo much more than the amount of continuations made in the 2000s. Fourteen in the US sector vs. twenty by March 2015, not even halfway through the decade. The 2010s brought us over 40 theatrical American animated movie sequels/franchise extensions, the real surge happening from 2016 to 2019. Throughout the decade, Disney Animation made three franchise extensions, Pixar made seven, DreamWorks made eight, Sony Animation made four (not counting reboot Smurfs: The Lost Village), Illumination made four, and Blue Sky made three. The rest were brought on by newcomers or distributors picking up the slack. (i.e. Paramount Animation and Sherlock Gnomes, etc.) It was just a sequel bonanza…
2020 managed to – despite world events – give us two sequels, too: Trolls World Tour and The Croods: A New Age, with the ones leaving that year occupying this year. It won’t stop, especially at your favorite studio. The only ones not making sequels are the LAIKA types, and several international studios as well. In the Western world, it is truly an American thing. Even some studios abroad can’t resist the call, hence Aardman making a second Shaun the Sheep film (already based on their TV show of the same name) and a Chicken Run 2. After so many decades of avoiding them, the industry just can’t get enough of them.
That Pixar is still going to make sequels (it was as inevitable as the turning of the earth) should not be surprising. While Pete Docter did acknowledge in the Hollywood Reporter piece that the studio made quite a lot of them this past decade, it’s still important to know the history behind that, and with animated movie sequels in general. The question is, what happens? The other studios were on this from the get-go, while Disney and Pixar were not. Disney Animation can now only feasibly do sequels to their more current CG films, but with them fully venturing into streaming/TV animation waters, they may just keep making originals… unless they make a movie that explicitly sets up a next part in the way Star Wars or a beloved multi-book adaptation does. Pixar is in a similar boat. Do they make more sequels to their classic perennial favorites? Or do they make new films that end with implications for follow-ups?
The Emeryville studio has Lightyear coming in 2022, a sci-fi adventure inspired by the Buzz Lightyear character, but it makes one wonder… What could they sequel-ize at this point? What other movies could do they do a spin-off of without the risk of tainting the original stories? With Toy Story‘s characters being… Well… Toys… You could set those characters in the worlds their toy counterparts are based on, and it made sense for Buzz Lightyear (there already was a TV series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, in the early aughts). Could make sense for Woody (Woody’s Roundup, coming summer 2026!), or perhaps the Battlesaurs or something like that. I don’t quite see that with the other early Pixar films, though. Since Brad Bird is protective of his super family and wants to keep pursuing original stories, I doubt Pixar will return to the world of The Incredibles anytime soon. There’s also nothing like that to do with the Finding Nemo settings and characters, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to see another movie set in the Monster World of Monsters, Inc. No Mike and Sulley, but other monsters living in that world. What else is out there besides Monstropolis and the university? And as cool as one would be, an A Bug’s Life sequel is virtually un-doable without the deceased members of its cast. (I know it didn’t stop Pixar from re-casting in Toy Story and Cars sequels, but still…) I firmly think they should leave the rest of the originals they’ve made since then (such as Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Coco) alone. Disney+ series are a great alternative avenue for us to revisit characters from films like Up, Inside Out, Onward, and Soul. Looks like that “Pixar Popcorn” series on Disney+ will be a home for that kind of thing.
At this point, it’s a compromise. Some people remark in articles and papers that animation is something like the “last bastion of originality in Hollywood”, so it’s understandable that folks get skeptical over the waxing amount of sequels being made in animation-land. And yet, even the studios indulging in sequels are still making time for originals here and there. Illumination makes tons of sequels and spin-offs, but you still got two originals and a Dr. Seuss adaptation from them over the past five years, with a Mario movie on the horizon. (Adaptations, schmadaptations, animation’s full of them, as is Hollywood. Has been.) It’s not like Western theatrical animation is completely engulfed in franchises, even as studios tend to announce that they are focusing on original stories. Oooh, ahhh, original stories, as if they were ever in the danger of being put to rest. Look, I love originality – as in, stories that are not based on anything or aren’t follow-ups – as much as the next person. I don’t write adaptations of stories that I love, I write my own stories and create my own characters. Not because I’m anti-adaptation, but because I prefer to leave others’ work alone and make my own stuff. So, no, I’m not clamoring for sequels to things, I want original stories to keep being a thing. That being said, I’m not going to look down my nose at folks wanting to continue their stories. By this logic, if I were around in 1977, I would’ve groused about George Lucas wanting to continue the adventures of Luke Skywalker and pals. I would’ve groused about this getting a sequel, and that getting a sequel… The only issue is when the sequels in question come up short, creatively, which can always be subjective.
I used to really paint those direct-to-video Disney sequels as the spawn of Satan, for example. But nowadays, I realize that ultimately, everyone onboard those films had a job, a budget, and mandates. All of those DTV films could’ve worked in my eyes, they have elements that are appealing and could be cooked into something better. In my more critical days, I sometimes would say whenever a studio announced a sequel to something I wasn’t too hot on: “Well, the sequel can only be an improvement from there!” At the end of the day, it is another movie, and to cast it off entirely is kind of unfair. If it’s a sequel to something I liked, I try to keep an open mind. If it’s a sequel to something I didn’t care for, then I normally just avoid it, but I acknowledge that other folks might be looking forward to it.
Original animated movies going the way of the quagga (long-time readers are probably saying “pick a different extinct animal already!”) only happens if every single one of them flops, but that scenario can’t happen. This isn’t hand-drawn animated features circa 2001-02; it would have to be a deliberate concentrated plan to kill those kinds of movies for good. If it was a truly dire situation, we’d be on Despicable Me 10 or Shrek 26 by now. Eventually, interest wanes, or studios know when to stop. No theatrical animated feature series here in the states comes close to the Land Before Time series in terms of sequel quantity, for starters. That series made it to 14 movies, nothing is close. Closest I can think of is Despicable Me, with four (4th one is in development) mainline movies and two Minion spin-offs. In Japan, a Doraemon movie happens almost every year, ditto Pokemon movies, and the anime industry pumps out lots of new theatrical stuff on a regular basis. I think we’ll be fine.
I just guess, in the end, that this massive amount of animated sequels is an inadvertent response to the relative lack of them over the course of seven decades.