There’s more troubling news from the world of Pixar Animation Studios. Last month, the company removed Bob Peterson as the director of their upcoming film, The Good Dinosaur, and replaced him with a four-man committee that included Toy Story filmmaker and Pixar head honcho John Lasseter. Now The Los Angeles Times reports that in light of the project’s ongoing struggles, Pixar is pushing the film back, from next year to 2015. The move will make 2014 the first calendar year without a Pixar movie since 2005.
Here’s Pixar President Ed Catmull, explaining the decision to The Times:
“Nobody ever remembers the fact that you slipped a film, but they will remember a bad film. Our conclusion was that we were going to give the [dinosaur] film some more time.”
Bumping The Good Dinosaur will also impact at least one other upcoming Pixar film. Finding Dory, Andrew Stanton’s sequel to Finding Nemo, was originally scheduled to open on November 25, 2015. Now The Good Dinosaur will open on that date and Dory will wait until the summer of 2016 (it takes a long time to find a forgetful fish, okay?). The next Pixar movie to appear in theaters will be the “risky” (in The Times’ words) Inside Out, a film set inside the brain of a little girl directed by Up's Pete Docter. That comes out in June 2015.
The Times also notes that Pixar still hasn’t found a permanent replacement for Petersen as Good Dinosaur director (they claim he was removed when the film’s original 2014 release date started creeping closer and “several creative decisions had not been made”). At this point, I’m starting to worry that maybe this dinosaur isn’t all that great.