25 Years Later, Pixar Is Reviving Monsters, Inc.
Revisit your childhood monsters.
No franchise is safe from a legacyquel. One of the original Ghostbusters is no longer with us, but that hasn’t stopped the franchise from returning to the big screen over and over. It had been decades since Beetlejuice graced our theaters, but the temptation to combine Catherine O’Hara, Winona Ryder, and new Tim Burton it-girl Jenna Ortega as three generations of Deetzes proved too powerful to resist.
Animated movies are especially prone to this trend, as characters can be drawn as though no time has passed at all. Now, a beloved Pixar movie is coming back for a third installment that finally delivers a follow-up to the original story.
Pete Docter directed Monsters, Inc. in 2001, and now he’s overseeing development on a sequel.
A Wall Street Journal profile of Pixar CEO Pete Docter teased many upcoming projects, like Incredibles 3, Coco 2, and the studio’s first-ever musical, from Turning Red director Domee Shi. But perhaps the most exciting announcement is that Monsters, Inc. 3 is in early development, the first sequel in the film’s 25-year history.
2013’s Monsters University was a prequel depicting Mike Wazowski and James “Sulley” Sullivan as they meet in college and try to bring a fraternity of misfits to glory. So while we’ve seen these characters once since their first movie, we haven’t seen what happened to them after they switched tacks and started using laughs as a power source instead of screams.
It’s not the first time a follow-up has been in development. In the mid-2000s, a sequel tentatively titled Monsters, Inc. 2: Lost in Scaradise followed Mike and Sulley as they ventured into the human world with the hopes of visiting an older Boo for her birthday party. The project was canceled after Disney acquired Pixar, but perhaps some elements will be folded into this new sequel.
Boo is now old enough to have credit card debt, so maybe that will provide the movie’s scares.
Because this movie is so early in development, there are no clues as to its content, but the timing allows us to make an educated guess. Monsters, Inc. was focused on young kids growing up at the turn of the millennium. Monsters University revisited those characters 12 years later, just in time for those same kids to be starting their own college adventures. Now, that demographic is growing up and perhaps having kids of their own. Could this story pick up on Boo becoming a mother and introducing her child to her old friends?
It’s the perfect recipe for a legacyquel: bring in a new kid to carry on the franchise. The movie could even go a step further and introduce the kids of Mike and Sulley, meaning we could see a whole new crop of adventures from these kids; it all hinges on how time works in the world of monsters (and at Pixar HQ).
