Jay Ward, the creative director of Disney and Pixar‘s Cars franchise, has confirmed that new installments are in development.
Ward, who has worked at Pixar Animation Studios for 25 years, addressed the future of the Cars franchise at the recent Porsche Rennsport Reunion 7. “There are more Cars things brewing, I can’t say much more yet,” he told The Late Brake Show (via ComicBook.com). “Cars has got a life that will keep going. I am working on some real fun projects right now that you will see in a couple of years. It takes us a while to make them.”
Pixar’s Cars franchise so far
The animated Cars franchise kicked off in 2006 with the eponymous film starring Owen Wilson as the voice of anthropomorphic racecar Lightning McQueen. Two sequels released in 2011 and 2017, respectively. A spin-off film titled Planes hit theaters in 2013. That movie got its own sequel in 2014. The Cars series has spawned four stand-alone short films, with Planes also getting a short film of its own.
Additionally, a series of one-to-seven-minute animated shorts titled Cars Toons ran on Disney Channel, the now-defunct Toon Disney, and ABC Family (now known as Freeform) from 2008 to 2014. Some of the Cars Toons shorts also debuted theatrically or on home video. A series of eight-minute shorts titled Cars on the Road later premiered on Disney+ in 2022.
Cars producers Kevin Reher and Andrea Warren previously addressed the possibility of a fourth-main series feature film. “If there’s a good story to tell I mean our heads kinda break after having gotten this one done, like oh my god what could you do the further adventures of?” Reher told CinemaBlend ahead of the release of Cars 3 in 2017. “But like any sequel, from Toy Story 4 to Incredibles, as long as there’s a good story to tell it’s worth investing, we do love these characters, we love them as much as the public does.”
Reher and Warren also indicated that a fourth Cars film might center on Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo), a key character introduced in Cars 3.
