John Lasseter Says There Will Be No Marvel/Pixar Movie

Only minutes after Disney bought Marvel, the questions began: might we ever see Marvel Universe characters rendered by Pixar? The animation company has demonstrated an affection for Marvel-style heroes with The Incredibles, which with a bit of tweaking could easily have been a Fantastic Four story. And early statements on Disney's part suggested the team-up might be a possibility.

Yet despite the chain of business relationships that link both Pixar and Marvel to Disney, the chance of a Pixar/Marvel movie ever happening still seemed slim, and possibly too much to hope for. Indeed, according to John Lasseter, it's not going to happen.

Speaking with IGN, John Lasseter had the following exchange:

Disney has been great. Bob Iger is phenomenal. I'm Chief Creative Officer of Disney Animation as well, and with Pixar it's like, "Keep doing what you're doing, guys." It's a filmmaker-driven studio. All of the ideas come from the filmmakers themselves. Working with the filmmakers on ideas.

IGN: So there probably wouldn't be any kind of chance of seeing that kind of team-up then?

No, not at Pixar. We have The Incredibles, so we've done superheroes here ourselves and so we have that kind of history with Brad Bird doing The Incredibles.

Realistically, there probably wasn't reason to expect that a Pixar/Marvel movie would ever happen; each company is very much established doing its own thing. This even though Disney head Bob Iger suggested that some discussions took place very early on when he said,

We've talked about [a Marvel/Pixar team-up] internally. Pixar boss John Lasseter talked to the Marvel guys about this and they all got excited about it. We think there's ultimately some exciting product that come of that. Sparks will fly!

What happened? No way of knowing. More likely any opportunity that might have existed was squashed by business entanglements rather than creative dissonance.