Pixar Animation Studios have an incredible strike rate when it comes to hit movies
they've made over six point two billion dollars at the box office and have an
average review rating around 93 percent what happens when it all goes wrong
that's what faced president Pixar Animation Studios Jim Morris on the new
film The Good dinosaur originally due out last year they had to stop
production they fired almost the entire cast and completely retooled the story we
started on the good dinosaur a long time ago and we had a basic pitch that was
given that we all liked very much and so forth and we worked on it for a long
time and it took us a while to figure out that there were some basic things in
the story idea we were trying to tell that we couldn't fix and weren't gonna work out
and you know we were fairly far down the path we were three years plus into the
making of the film and and we just realized that it wasn't gonna be good enough
everything we tried to do to fix it just felt like we were overplotting or bolting
something on the didn't feel organic and so we made the hard decision to stop
working on that film and do a reboot and there are still things about the world
and the characters we like a lot but the story just wasn't working so the truth
is all that is survived
the first idea is some of the design of the two key characters everything else
about the story what it's about
even look of it has changed and it was you know thank God Disney trusts us, and
said, if that's what you guys think you need to do
because otherwise
we'd all been fired for incompetency when you do make that
decision to reboot on a production you've got an army of people working on
a film yes what does that do to the building one of the you know how does
that news reverberate throughout the the company it can be fairly traumatic when
we make a big change to a movie like that that's been cooking along you know
we've had we've had great luck and misfortune and I've had a lot of my
career in different forms I worked on some have gone through the roof and
others just haven't landed in the same way so we take solace in it in the
leadership ranks in like well the point is to not put a bad movie out and get
the best possible movie but it's a little disturbing to people working on
the project for a while it's tricky it's it's it's a disturbance in the force
When you're working on a film how do you know that it works?
Because there's lots of talk about the quality control that goes into Pixar movies. when do you know it's working?
We never know for sure that it's working
Opening week box office is how you know?
That's how we know if it's connecting. We never really know if it's working.
we've got broken down trash compactor who is living on a post-apocalyptic
earth compact track I mean to sound like a great idea for it but I think it'd be
safe to say that every producer director there that they were trying to make
something even inside out which is turned out really connect with audiences
but was unusual but at some point you go