Incredibles 2 Director Weighs In On If We'll See A Third Film

It took 14 years for The Incredibles to finally get a sequel, but will we have another long wait before we get to see the Parr family again? Writer/director Brad Bird teased in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that we may see an Incredibles 3, but it will likely be a while.

Bird started thinking about making a sequel while he was doing press for the original film in 2004, and his real inspiration lay in the unfinished storylines left in the original movie, including the questions about Jack-Jack's powers, as well as the potential to see Bob (Craig T. Nelson) and Helen (Holly Hunter) switch roles in their family and in superhero-dom. 

Although both of those lingering plot points were explored in The Incredibles 2, there's still plenty of ground to cover in a potential third film, with Bird noting that he had to make some big sacrifices in creating the film. His work was made even tougher by the fact that Pixar swapped the movie's release date with Toy Story 4 in October of 2016, giving Bird a full year less to work than he thought he would get.

Bird noted that a lot of good ideas were dropped because there were problems "you couldn't linger on." "It's like the episode of I Love Lucy when she's got the candies piling up on the conveyer belt," he said. "This film was like that. They took a year off our schedule, so if an idea didn't work quickly, you had to just kill the darling and move onto the next. And I killed like a city full of darlings."

If Bird did end up making a third film, he could have the chance to explore those ideas, which he notes are "really good." "Some of them were really funny and cool and explored certain things," he said. "You know, you never say never, because there might be an opportunity to use it. Maybe the idea shows up in a different film. There was an idea I had for an animated version of The Spirit that I ended up using in The Iron Giant."

"You never know how these things are going to get repurposed," he continued. "There were a lot of ideas that we had on this film that could be [used]... whether it's another Incredibles film, or something else." Although he did push heavily on the "something else," he also noted that making the first film was "the most fun [he'd] ever had making a movie," which hopefully would prompt him to push towards making an Incredibles 3.

However, Bird clarified that he didn't want to make a third film just because of studio pressure or because of the trend of franchises and reboots that push filmmakers to stick to the familiar and avoid experimentation. Still, though, no one is giving a definitive no. "I wouldn't ever rule it out," said producer John Walker. "And if past is prologue, it'll be another 14 years — and a lot of people will probably need oxygen to make a third one."

Sarah Vowell, Huck Milner, Bob Odenkirk, Jonathan Banks, Catherine Keener, Sophia Bush, and Bird also star in The Incredibles 2. The movie, which earned a 94 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and received an A+ CinemaScore ahead of a record smashing $180 million opening weekend, is in theaters now.