If there’s one person who should be able to instill some hope in fans wishing that Disney’s stake in Marvel and Pixar studios could lead to a collaboration someday, it would probably be animation stalwart and Pixar founding father John Lasseter. While Pixar has been generating quality films from “Toy Story” to this week’s release of “Brave” (our review here) for some time, the acquisition of Marvel Studios still feels fairly recent, and the overwhelmingly creative folks at Pixar don’t seem the type to pick up a franchise for a quick buck.
Lasseter sat down with Collider for the “Brave” press junket this past week in Scotland, and seemed relatively inviting when posed the question of a possible Marvel team-up with his studio Pixar, saying, “Well, I can’t say anything about that because Marvel just got—[they’ve] been a couple years as part of the Disney company, we’ve been six years as part of the Disney company. And at Pixar, we stay focused on making original films. Even our sequels are kind of created internally and we come up with ideas [on our own]. I’m also leading the Walt Disney Animation Studio and all of that.” Though he doesn't rule it out completely, and leaves the door open to the possibility saying “these studios are filmmaker driven studios, so if a filmmaker comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I wanna do this,’ then I would be really open to it.” Sounds like an interesting prospect, and it’s no surprise that Lasseter would want a director driven approach, as Pixar honchos famously depend on filmmakers to partner up with fellow producers to create original and compelling ideas for films before they ever even go near their animators.
So what would a Pixar/Marvel collaboration look like and be? Is there a character that seems ripe for melding the storytelling techniques of both studios into one? Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige seemed similarly open to idea with no current plans for a pair-up when he talked to Collider back in April. "It’s probably not hard to put two and two together and assume that once Disney purchased Marvel, there would be conversations about are there any characters or properties that would make sense for Walt Disney’s animated studios to bring to life. They’re having those discussions, they have been for years," he said, noting that nothing was cooking at the moment. But we’re sure if given the right character, story and filmmaker, the pairing could certainly produce wonders.