‘The Good Dinosaur,’ ‘Elemental’ Director Pete Sohn To Direct ‘Incredibles 3’

Pixar veteran Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur, Elemental) is set to direct the third installment of Disney-Pixar’s The Incredibles franchise.

Sohn will direct from a screenplay written by Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the first two films in the series. Bird is also on board as a producer, alongside Dana Murray (Soul).

Sohn is a protégé of Bird, and has worked on all of his productions to date. Sohn was a Calarts student when he reached out to Bird during the production of Warner Bros.’ The Iron Giant and Bird gave him a summer job as an animation assistant on the film. Later, when Bird was hired at Pixar in 2000 to work on the first Incredibles, Sohn was one of around 15 people he brought aboard to help develop the film.

In a 2023 interview, Bird said of Sohn, “He’s a multi-talent. That’s one of the reasons that I was always interested in whatever he was doing. He is kind of insatiable. He wants to know about every part of the process, and he wants to be able to understand every part of the process and even do every part of the process, because it allows him to understand the beast.”

On the first Incredibles, Sohn animated one of Bird’s favorite scenes, during which Bob Parr asks his wife Helen to stay back in a fight, telling her, “I can’t lose you again. … I’m not strong enough,” followed by Helen kissing him. Bird spoke about the scene in the same interview:

Those kinds of scenes are really easy to do badly, because they can easily come off as artificial. And Pete did this wonderful kiss. There were technical limitations to the models that we were using. … Humans were a weak part of character cg animation. There weren’t too many successfully done humans — they were kind of ugly looking and awkward and all of that. We had to kind of push hard to get them to feel really physical. That was a very delicate scene, and Pete did a fantastic job on it.

Sohn’s last film, Elemental (2023), proved to be a strong performer at the box office, earning nearly $500 million in global box office. Bird’s Incredibles 2 grossed $1.24 billion in global box office and was Pixar’s highest-grossing film of all time until last year’s Inside Out 2 knocked it down a peg to second place.

In addition to writing and producing Incredibles 3, Bird is also currently directing the cg feature Ray Gunn for Skydance Animation and Netflix.