Why is Disney/Pixar making a sequel to Cars?

First, let's talk about why they shouldn't.

Here is every Pixar movie.

The number is the total worldwide gross...


Toy Story
1995
$361,958,736

A Bug's Life
1998
$363,398,565

Toy Story 2
1999
$485,015,179

Monsters, Inc.
2001
$525,366,597

Finding Nemo
2003
$864,625,978

The Incredibles
2004
$631,442,092

Cars
2006
$461,981,604

Ratatouille
2007
$620,261,049





Cars was clearly the stinker of the bunch, if $461 million, two Oscar nominations, and a Golden Globe could possibly be called a stinker. =^)


This makes me wonder why they’re making a sequel to Cars instead of The Incredibles, Finding Nemo (maybe a Crush movie), or Monsters Inc.


My answer is... Merchandise.


Merchandise is probably the motivation for creating a sequel to Cars, seeing how it certainly isn’t the Box Office. (It makes more sense from a Box Office perspective to do a Crush movie, or a sequel to Incredibles or Monster’s Inc.)


Disney made more money off of merchandising Cars than any other Pixar movie.


Disney makes more revenue in merchandising than any other source. Even in the parks, more money comes from merchandise than food or tickets.

I remembered reading an article where Disney said they were hitting it big with girls with the Princess franchise and hoped to continue to get merchandise brands out of Pixar from Toy Story (which was their biggest success with boys), Incredibles, and Cars. (On the DreamWorks side, I’m sure they’re raking it in with Shrek and Madagascar.)

On a side note, they should make an Incredibles cartoon and place it in the older time frame when Supers ran rampant. That’s where the big money is for boys: TV cartoons and related merchandise (Warner Bros. has banked on it for 15 years).

Plus Pixar probably already thought of a killer idea for a Cars sequel, and that’s a motivating factor. It doesn’t take much to think of a sequel to Cars. The concept has “road trip” written all over it (which is pretty much the whole story of both Toy Story movies and Finding Nemo), and the road trip concept wasn’t used to its fullest potential in the first Cars movie.

- TAE