For over a decade, Brad Bird has been trying to make a live action film about the San Francisco fire of 1906. There’s a hint he may have progress.
Here’s something a bit curious. Over the last 24 hours, news dropped that The Incredibles 3 is definitely going ahead at Pixar. That much was already well known, but the news that Brad Bird isn’t directing it? That wasn’t.
Bird wrote and directed the first two The Incredibles films, and he’s basically the parent of the franchise. Peter Sohn, who steered Elemental for Pixar, is taking over directing duties for the new sequel.
The reason? Brad Bird is a busy man. He’s still working away on Ray Gunn, a movie that he’d been trying to get made for decades and now – with a chunk of Netflix cash – he’s slap bang in the middle of.
But another film that he’s been trying to get off the ground is 1906, a live action tale of the San Francisco earthquake and fires of the same year. I first interviewed Brad Bird around 15 years ago, and he was on the verge of getting the movie made then. It was set to be his live action feature directorial debut, until it ran into prolonged development and he jumped onto Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol instead. Over time, Bird would talk about 1906 in interviews, but the film was presumed lost in development forever.
Here’s the curious thing, though. In the original The Hollywood Reporter article breaking the news of Peter Sohn’s ascension to The Incredibles 3 director’s chair, the piece noted that Brad Bird is “in pre-production on Skydance’s Ray Gunn, as well as 1906 for Disney.”
Since then, the article has been updated – hours after it was published – with the reference to 1906 removed.
What’s gone on there, then? Up until this moment, I’d assumed 1906 was dormant, with no chance of it being resurrected. But presumably that sentence didn’t slip into the piece accidentally, and that Disney has taken an interest in the movie is new news. 1906, to my knowledge, was never set up at Disney.
Whatever’s happened, someone I’d assume has asked for that line to be removed. It’s gone in the article that you can find here. But it was most certainly there before.
More as we hear it.
