Pixar Is Making ‘Inside Out 2’

To date five Pixar movies have gotten sequels or prequels: Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, and Cars. Obviously, some of those films have gotten more than one follow-up; there are four Toy Storys and three Cars to date. And now there will be a second Inside Out.

As announced by Pixar at the D23 convention, the company is developing a follow-up to the popular 2015 feature about the inner life of an 11-year-old girl. Much of the original film is set inside the brain of an ordinary kid named Riley, whose brain is controlled by five different anthropomorphized emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Bill Hader), and Disgust (Mindy Kaling).

The details announced so far: Poehler will be back as Joy, and the film will be directed by Kelsey Mann and written by Meg LeFauve, who was one of the three credited co-writers of the original Inside Out screenplay. (The first movie’s director and co-writer, Pete Docter, is now Pixar’s chief creative officer.)

No details yet whether the film will still focus on Riley, or whether Poehler will play the Joy inside another person’s head. And if it’s about Riley, we don’t know if the new film will be set shortly after the events of the first film or if will take place years later. By the time the sequel comes out in 2024, nine years will have passed since Inside Out was released to theaters. If Riley was aging in real time, she’d be 20 years old. An Inside Out 2 that takes place inside the mind of a college junior would be … a very different sort of movie than the last one.

Inside Out is due out in the summer of 2024. The next Pixar movie, Elemental, premieres on June 16, 2023.

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