“Ratatouille” director Brad Bird and the animated movie’s star Patton Oswalt have notably different stances when it comes to the topic of a potential sequel.
Namely, Bird, whose upcoming animated film “Ray Gunn” is set to be released on Netflix this December, made it clear he has no interest in whipping up “Ratatouille’s” next course.
“No. I don’t,” Bird said point-blank when asked by Collider if he was interested in making a “Ratatouille 2.”
He continued: “They’ve made little feints towards that to see how I would react. They’ll, like, crack a joke, but the joke will be a little bit serious, like, ‘Would you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we told that story.’”
Per Bird, he faces the same issues when discussing “The Iron Giant” with people, which he admitted was surprising given the Jennifer Aniston-led animated movie for Warner Bros. was not a box office success.
“Any time you do something that ends up connecting with people, they automatically think, ‘How about another?’” he noted. “People have mentioned it about ‘The Iron Giant,’ which is hilarious to me because the film didn’t succeed at all in its initial release. It’s caught up in time, but what would you do to follow that up? He’s lumbering around, still undiscovered? In other words, to me, that story is told.”
While Bird may be against the idea of a sequel to “Ratatouille,” Oswalt, who voiced Remy the food-loving rat for the 2007 Pixar film, said he’d “love” to be involved if a part two happened. Though, Oswalt said his involvement would be entirely on Bird’s vision for the project.
“There was never gonna be an ‘Incredibles’ sequel until he thought, ‘Wait a minute. There is a story to tell,’” Oswalt said of Bird, who also directed Pixar’s “The Incredibles” and “Incredibles 2”. (“Incredibles 3” is also in the works, and Bird told Collider that he “could see another ‘Incredibles’ film” coming to fruition.)
“So if he gets an idea, that’s the one I wanna do. I don’t wanna be the guy going, ‘Hey, what if Remy did this?’ I want it to be one of those ideas that happens that you cannot get away from,” Oswalt added on the “Obsessed” podcast last week. “I don’t want it to come from us going, ‘All right, let’s get out the legal pads and let’s break down a sequel.’ There are a lot of movies where that’s how they’re done, and it always feels inorganic.”
