Once a studio that prided itself on making two original films for every sequel, Pixar appears to be leaning even harder on franchise insurance—even as a few original bets, like “Gatto” and the unannounced “Ono Ghost Market,” continue moving through development.
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A new Wall Street Journal report says the studio is developing a third “Monsters, Inc.” film, adding another sequel to a pipeline that already includes “Toy Story 5,” “Incredibles 3,” and “Coco 2.” Disney has already publicly dated “Toy Story 5” for June 19, 2026, officially announced “Incredibles 3” as in the works with Brad Bird for 2028, and confirmed “Coco 2” is headed for theaters in 2029.
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That makes the larger shift hard to miss. Pixar’s old reputation was built on originals arriving with enough emotional precision and formal confidence to feel like event movies on their own terms. Now the studio looks more openly aligned with the modern studio reflex: lean on known brands, keep the merchandising-friendly franchises alive, and use originals more selectively—when they can still be sold as distinctive enough to break through. The WSJ frames that balance pretty plainly, describing a slate now weighted more heavily toward sequels than the studio once would have tolerated.
Still, the report doesn’t paint a picture of a studio that has abandoned new ideas altogether. It points to “Gatto,” the Venice-set original from Enrico Casarosa (“Luca”), which Disney formally unveiled at Annecy last year for a summer 2027 release. The Journal says the film is experimenting with a more hand-painted visual texture for fur and hair, a small but notable sign that Pixar’s house style may still have some elasticity left in it.
Then there’s “Ono Ghost Market,” which the paper says began life as a streaming series and is rooted in Asian myths about supernatural marketplaces where the living and the dead intersect. Pixar has not publicly unveiled that title, which makes it one of the more intriguing details in the report—a project that sounds stranger, riskier, and less immediately toy-ready than the sequel machinery surrounding it.
The same report says Pixar is also developing its first musical, with Domee Shi (“Turning Red,” “Bao”) attached. That would be a new lane for the studio if it comes together, and not an illogical one for Shi, whose work already leans into heightened emotion, comic momentum, and pop-inflected feeling without losing its specificity. But, as with “Ono Ghost Market,” the project remains something reported rather than publicly unveiled by Disney.
So the picture here is less “Pixar has stopped making originals” than “Pixar is making them under narrower, more cautious conditions.” Sequels are now the ballast. Originals have to justify themselves as either aesthetic departures, like “Gatto,” or conceptually unusual swings, like “Ono Ghost Market.” Whether that tension produces a healthier balance or just a more polished version of franchise triage is the real question hanging over the studio now.
