A few months ago we learned that Pixar is finally moving forward with plans for The Incredibles 2, bringing writer and director Brad Bird back for the highly-anticipated sequel to the 2004 animated film. We haven’t heard much since then, but Bird himself now has a bit of an update on the project and says he’s almost done with his first pass at the script.

We still don’t know much about The Incredibles 2 — Pixar only had a teaser poster to offer at D23, and Bird has remained mostly quiet since the sequel was announced, but in a new interview with Collider, Bird reveals that he’s come pretty far in developing the story and is almost done with his first draft of the script:

I have the story arc. I’m probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we’re already boarding parts of it. I’ve got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we’re all having a good time with it.

But when will The Incredibles 2 hit theaters? Pixar films take a long time to put together, and it could still be years before we see the sequel. Bird says:

In terms of the release date, we were originally—[the original] Incredibles was supposed to happen after Cars, and our wheels just happened to click a little earlier so they moved us up. Release dates are a little fluid when you’re making films so far in advance. Some films are tougher to come together and tough nuts to crack, and other ones comes together a little more quickly, and so I’m just going to work as fast as I can work well with a relatively small team because I like small teams better until you’ve got everything firmly figured out.

Finding Dory, the upcoming sequel to Finding Nemo, was announced back in 2012 and isn’t hitting theaters until next summer. Pixar has The Good Dinosaur arriving this fall, followed by Finding Dory next summer, and Toy Story 4 and Coco in 2017. That means we might not see The Incredibles 2 until 2018, unless one of the 2017 films gets pushed back — which wouldn’t be unprecedented.

Since The Incredibles first hit theaters in 2004, we’ve experienced a bit of a superhero movie boom, to say the least. Bird’s film was a bit ahead of the curve, and the filmmaker is very aware of the pressures of trying to set The Incredibles 2 apart:

…there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there’s a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don’t want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we’re trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us.

Bird’s update on The Incredibles 2 doesn’t give us much in the way of details, but it seems like the director is well on-track to getting the sequel together.

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