The slapstick-loving Minions from “Despicable Me” have helped power the franchise to $5.4 billion and counting at the worldwide box office, making it the highest-grossing animated series in history. Chris Renaud, who directed the first two “Despicable Me” films and returned this year for the fourth sequel, recently spoke to Film Hounds magazine and was asked about Disney’s trend of turning its animated classics into live-action movies. Would he ever want to see the Minions jump to that format?
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“God, I hope not. That’s my answer,” Renaud answered bluntly.
“If there were conversations like that, I haven’t been privy to them,” Renaud said. “But for me, what defines the world is that it is animated and it allows us to get away with what we get away with. Like locking a minion in the vending machine, or you know, blowing up Gru when he attacks Vector. These are really cartoon ideas, like what would have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.”
“It just becomes something completely different if you do a live-action version,” he added. “For me personally, not very appealing. But again, who knows what can happen but that’s my personal feeling about it.”
Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter also recently shot down the idea of turning Pixar movies into live-action films. Ahead of the release of the record-breaking “Inside Out 2,” Docter spoke to Time magazine and was asked if he’d ever consider developing live-action versions of Pixar’s films after a fan campaign to cast Josh O’Connor (“Challengers,” “The Crown”) in a live-action “Ratatouille” started trending online.
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“No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me,” Docter told the publication. “I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
Docter added that making a live-action film about a rat “would be tough” because “so much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world.”
“So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’” he continued, referring to 2009’s “Up.” “But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
“Inside Out 2” became the highest-grossing animated film of all time this summer, while Renaud’s own “Despicable Me 4” put up its own blockbuster numbers with $811 million worldwide and counting.
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