The Hollywood Reporter tells of a meeting between the Disney live action feature department and the brain trust over at Pixar to help with the next Muppet movie.
Beyond whatever advice might have come down for the project at hand, the fact that Pixar has its fingers in the Muppets pie suggests that Disney, under the new regime of Rich Ross and Sean Bailey, is intent on taking advantage of its subsidiary’s storytelling abilities.
I’m all for Disney making use of the talent it has at hand, but let’s hope The House of Mouse doesn’t dip into the pot too often that it waters down the story telling of Pixar’s most awesome animated films.
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Let’s not kid ourselves; if this movie is successful, we’ll see 50 more watered down clone versions of it hit the market in the following year. It’s the standard practice these days, “Well, everyone’s into these vampires, let’s do 10 more vampire… things. If it doesn’t stick, we’ve lost 3 million. If it does, we’ll make 100 million. It all evens out in the end.”
If anyone can carry on the tradition of mixing humor & pathos effectively like Jim Henson & Jerry Juhl did, it’s probably the folks at Pixar. Like you, though, I really hope that they don’t stretch themselves too thin and have all of their product suffer.
I’m torn. I don’t want Pixar watered down, but I also want to see Muppet films as good as The Muppet Movie or The Muppets Take Manhattan.
If Pixar could make that happen, it would SO be worth it.
And, to be honest, the clone film things are hit and miss: particularly with kid’s movies. Yeah, one year, you’ll have 5 penguin movies and another you’ll have a dozen ninja movies, but it isn’t like that happens every time there’s a hit. Toy Story was a huge success when it came out in 1995, but it isn’t like the market was flooded with toy-themed movies in 1996. Closest thing to it was Small Soldiers in 1998 (the same year Antz and Bug’s Life came out).
What happened to Jason Segel at the helm of The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made?
I’m all for this, I just really want the Muppets to get out there and make another great movie. I love me some Muppets, and I love me some Pixar. And besides, I don’t think it’ll hurt Pixar any, they had a clear line-up of movies they were making a few years ago and I don’t think Muppet type movies were in that list, so they aren’t going to be taking away from a potential Pixar movie to help with this one (at least I hope they won’t). But if the movie turns out to be awesome, then I really don’t care who brings it to me, I just want to see great Muppet Mayhem and some sweet cuts to Statler and Waldorf breaking the Fourth Wall and commenting on the whole she-bang. (Actually Muppets have always been about breaking the 4th wall anyhow, maybe that’s why it always felt like they were talking right to me.)