While Disney honcho Alan Horn‘s comments about “Star Wars 7” dominated the news yesterday, he also touched upon a couple of other big properties in the Mouse House that fans (and investors) are keeping an eye on.
You might think that with the $1.1 billion success of “Frozen,” Disney would be hot to trot on a sequel, but surprisingly, that’s not the case. According to THR, “Disney’s sole focus at the moment was getting the ‘Frozen’ musical ready for Broadway and that a sequel hadn’t even been discussed.” That initially might seem counterintuitive, but from the standpoint of expanding the brand, it makes perfect sense. And since animated films take years to make anyway, no sense rushing something out until they have the approach they want.
And that seems to be the attitude Disney is taking with “Pirates Of The Caribbean 5,” which at one point had a release date, but has since been delayed. And once again, it’s all about making sure everything is in the best shape possible before spending hundreds of millions of dollars. “We haven’t seen a screenplay yet that I’ve been able to sign off on… There’s a lot of variables that affect the final outcome once it leaves the studio lot, so we are very careful,” Horn offered about the further adventures of Jack Sparrow.
Meanwhile, other studios are beefing up their franchise offerings, starting with Universal. They’re getting ready to bring “Jurassic World” to cinemas next year, and duh, they might want to make more of them, and sequels are already being talked about. “We definitely talked about [sequels] a lot,” the director/co-writer Colin Trevorrow told Empire. “We wanted to create something that would be a little bit less arbitrary and episodic, and something that could potentially arc into a series that would feel like a complete story.”
And that’s not all, Trevorrow reveals that two key characters would likely return (unless one of them gets eaten in the first film). “He’s essentially Chris Pratt’s best friend,” he said about Omar Sy‘s character. “They work together and have some pretty cool action scenes together. I wanted to create a relationship there that could be memorable and potentially carry on to future films.” But until those sequels, the first film has to get made, and today EW dropped the first set pics which you can see below.
So, there you go. And it would seem Disney, of all studios, is taking the most patient approach when it comes sequels. Who knew?
