Brad Bird Talks 'Incredibles 2;' Willing To Make A Sequel, But Only With The Right Story

The Incredibles is a great movie. It might be the best superhero movie, and it is certainly one of the best Pixar efforts. With Pixar making sequels more often now than in the past, naturally questions arise about a follow-up to Brad Bird's story of a super-powered family. But we've never heard anything that suggests a sequel is likely to happen.

Brad Bird is starting to promote Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, his first live-action movie. While talking about that movie last week, he was asked about a possible Incredibles sequel, and his answer was simple. Pretty much the answer I think anyone would hope he'd give: he's open to doing one, but only if the story is great.

Movies.com talked to Bird, who said that he hasn't really been pursuing a story for The Incredibles 2, but is gathering ideas and is open to the possibility:

I think the reason it hasn't [happened] yet is because the studio would like me to do it, if there were another Incredibles. And I've told them that I'm not really friendly to have someone else take away my child. I would like to think that I have several good ideas that could be incorporated into a next Incredibles, but I don't have a whole movie yet, and the last thing I want to do is do it just because it would open big, or something like that.

To get to the bottom line, he says,

I want to do it because I have something that will be as good or better than the original. Toy Story 2 was, to me, a perfect sequel, because it absolutely respected the first film but found new places to go without selling out its characters. So if I could come up with an idea that is to Incredibles that Toy Story 2 is to Toy Story, I would do it in a second.

For what it's worth, this is probably just becoming his stock answer to the question of a sequel, as it is almost exactly the same thing he said about the possibility way back in 2007. I'd much rather see no sequel than anything that would fall short of the original. It's too good a movie to exploit just for the sake of doing so, and I'm happy that it is able to be an original, standalone piece of work. If it remains that way, things wouldn't be so bad.