Incredibles 3 director announced - and it's not Brad Bird

The next instalment of one of Pixar’s best movie series, The Incredibles, now has a director attached. But it’s not Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the first two movies.

Peter Sohn has signed up to direct The Incredibles 3, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Sohn has worked at Pixar for 25 years — yikes — but has only directed two of the animation house’s full-length features to date.

These are Elemental (2023) and The Good Dinosaur (2015). They are not generally ranked among the best Pixar flicks. And neither made it into our own best Pixar movies round-up.

But we do think Elemental deserved more than the collective shrug we remember it receiving at release a couple of years ago. It makes for a charming Friday night watch.

Peter Sohn also has some professional history within The Incredibles. He worked as an animator on, and provided some voice work for, the original movie from 2004. And he was a story consultant on Incredibles 2.

Brad Bird hasn’t been exiled from the property entirely, though. He will still write Incredibles 3. He just won’t direct it, which may be down to his commitment to non-Pixar-movie Ray Gunn.

This is what we heard all the way back in December 2024, when Ray Gunn was mooted for a 2026 release on Netflix. It’s a noir-ish CGI detective movie, although we’ve heard little about its progress since then.

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Incredibles 3 feels like more of a dead cert, although Disney is yet to announce even a tentative release date — suggesting 2027 is the earliest you should hold out hope for. The film was announced in August 2024.

None of the key cast has been confirmed as returning either, although stars Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson are still very much active, the latter going strong at 81 years old.

There will be big expectations resting on The Incredibles 3’s shoulders, after the last film in the series took $1.24 billion at the box office, despite arriving 14 years after the original.

Pixar’s next big movie is Elio, due out later this month, on June 20th. And despite not being part of an existing franchise, Disney has reportedly spent up to $300 million making it. This means it will be Pixar’s most expensive film ever, at least before accounting for inflation.

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