After losing its director last month, the release for Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur has been pushed back from May 30, 2014 to November 25, 2015. Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie, will release on May 30 instead while Finding Dory, previously scheduled for November 2015, has also been pushed back to June 17, 2016. As a result of this schedule shuffle, Pixar will not release a movie for an entire year for the first time since 2005.
While all involved insist that there were no hard feelings with Bob Peterson’s departure and that everything is okay, one has to wonder just what has been going on at Pixar the last few years. From the release of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar quickly established a reputation for not only making high quality animated films, but for doing so consistently with very few missteps. More recently, three out of the four Pixar films released since 2010 have been sequels or spinoffs with Finding Dory still on the way. Conversely, before 2010 Pixar had released only one sequel (Toy Story 2). Furthermore, Pixar’s only original title since 2010, Brave, saw similar production difficulties when director Brenda Chapman was replaced with Mark Andrews. Pixar’s reputation still remains strong but audiences have to wonder if the glory days may have passed.
On the other hand, Pixar hopes to make up for 2014 by releasing two movies in 2015, a first in the studio’s entire history. In addition to The Good Dinosaur, 2015 will also (hopefully) see the release of Inside Out, a story set inside a young girl’s brain.
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