A few quick points to some of the concerns posted in this thread:
When you think of Cars’s schedule, there are a few things to keep in mind. Pixar wanted in on the summer schedule. Although Cars probably would have been able to be finished in time for a November release the previous year, a summer schedule benefits Pixar in several ways. Kids are out of school and in general families are more available not only to see more movies, but to see them during the weekdays. Go to boxofficemojo.com and look at the weeday comparisons for Finding Nemo, the Incredibles, Cars, and Ratatouille. You’ll notice that the weekday numbers are noticably smaller for the Incredibles, a fall release, than that of the other movies. I loved the Incredibles, but I think it it was really a summer type of movie and I would have been happier if it had been delayed until the next summer where it would have had a larger draw. Ratatouille, on the other hand, was more of a fall style of movie, and it suffered from an extremely competative market this summer. Pixar movies aren’t always well-placed with their release dates!
A summer movie draws a bigger audience, but also when you release a movie during the summer, these days you will usually have the DVD ready for Christmas sales. You have to admit that the Christmas shopping season is a tempting carrot! Summer movie → Christmas DVD.
It’s for those reasons that the Cars release date was moved – not because the movie wouldn’t get finished on time, but because the summer movie season is really the more profitable one, especially when you’re releasing more ‘summer’ types of movies like the Incredibles or Cars.
There are two more factors you might want to consider for the slow pace of Cars production. First, production on the movie was in full swing when the Disney/Pixar purchase took place, and Cars’s director, John Lasseter, had to split his time between directing his movie in Pixar and reorganizing animation at Disney. Those both strike me as full-time jobs, and he did them both. Second, many at Pixar just… rarely can give up their shots. If more time is an option… then that time will be spent making the shots look better, even when they were probably “good enough” to go into the movie.
You can see the timeline for the upcoming releases in the recent Time Magazine article on Pixar:
2007: Ratatouille
2008: Wall-E
2009: Up
2010: Toy Story 3
No other dates have been announced that I know of…
Pixar has long wanted to do sequels to its movies, but learned a bitter lesson with the Toy Story 2/Disney debacle. While on the outside they claimed that they preferred original stories instead of sequels, some of that was trying to put a positive spin on the fact that their contract with Disney made doing sequels… not exactly impossible, but very problematic. There are a lot of time-saving benefits that a 3-D animation studio can gain from a sequel without sacrificing quality – Many of the character designs are already created, models and sets can be reused, and there’s a built-in love for your characters… just look at the box office for the movies this summer. Apparently people prefer sequels and movies adapted from existing stories in other media. If Pixar can do a good sequel to a popular movie and they have a fantastic script… why shouldn’t they?
Finally, there were earlier Pixar movies that had one-disc releases… and then later on had a 2-disc version released as a “collector’s edition.”
