Brad Bird Gives An 'Incredibles 2' Status Update

We didn't see anything real from The Incredibles 2 at Disney's D23 confab aside from a new teaser poster. (The most relevant part of that poster is above.) We don't know when the film will be released, or what the story will be. But writer/director Brad Bird is making The Incredibles 2 his next film, and on the occasion of the re-release of his first movie, The Iron Giant, Bird is talking in very guarded terms about his upcoming sequel.

Bird told Collider,

I have the story arc. I'm probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we're already boarding parts of it. I've got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we're all having a good time with it.

But don't expect to get a release date out of Bird at this point, in part because that in-progress status means that things are still very subject to change.

In terms of the release date, we were originally—[the original] Incredibles was supposed to happen after Cars, and our wheels just happened to click a little earlier so they moved us up. Release dates are a little fluid when you're making films so far in advance. Some films are tougher to come together and tough nuts to crack, and other ones comes together a little more quickly, and so I'm just going to work as fast as I can work well with a relatively small team because I like small teams better until you've got everything firmly figured out.

The Incredibles was originally released in 2004, years before the current superhero and comic book movie boom really got under way. It was already building, thanks to the first X-Men and Spider-Man films, but it would be another year before Fox got its first Fantastic Four movie out of the gate and Batman Begins really helped prove that superheroes were ready to dominate the box office.

Bird knows that his first movie was released to a very different landscape than the one which will greet his Incredibles sequel.

...there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there's a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don't want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we're trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us.

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In lieu of a release date for The Incredibles 2, we'll note that you can check out a re-release of Bird's first feature when out The Iron Giant: Signature Edition is in theaters on September 30 and October 4, via Fathom Events.