Disney’s ‘Cars 3’ Gets A Lighter, Character-Focused Trailer

This Cars 3 trailer is more of a conventional trailer. After the first teaser which highlighted a shockingly realistic crash scene and a second that played up the sports underdog element, this trailer basically lays out the emotional stakes and the character arc. We’re still getting what amounts to a Rocky III/Dark Knight Rises riff (“When your race track is in ashes, then you have my permission to succumb.”) with probably not a little acknowledgment of the notion of aging past your prime and how to cope when you’re no longer the best at what you do. We’ll see if the film ends up being a metaphor for Pixar versus Illumination, or maybe just a metaphor for an artistically reahbilited Pixar franchise that makes good after a weak second installment. But that’s a conversation for when the film actually opens.

And yeah, as much as everyone likes to pick on the Cars franchise, I’d argue the first film is still pretty good. It just had the bad luck to open after the one-two punch of Finding Nemo and The Incredibles (and was followed by Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up). Had it followed A Bug’s Life or Monsters Inc., I imagine it wouldn’t have been so maligned.

The first act is tough, since Lightning McQueen is such an obnoxious schmuck, but once he crashes and gets stuck in Radiator Springs it gets into a relaxed groove. And I’ve always liked the ending, where McQueen sacrifices his own racing victory to help an injured vet get across the track. Now Cars 2, which is essentially a remake of If Looks Could Kill, falls victim to presuming that audiences wanted an entire film based around Daniel Lawrence Whitney’s Mater. Oh well, the film sold tons of merchandise and John Lasseter got to continue his favorite franchise.

And now we’ve got Cars 3, directed by Brian Fee making his directorial debut after getting his start designing props for a bunch of Disney’s early 2000’s direct-to-DVD animated sequels and doing storyboards for both prior Cars movies. Of note, Cars earned $244 million domestic in the summer of 2006, becoming the third-biggest movie of the year behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales ($423m) and Night at the Museum ($251m). It earned $462m worldwide to be the sixth-biggest earner of that year.

Cars 2 earned just $191 million domestic, Pixar’s second-lowest total (and smallest when adjusted for inflation) up to that point, although The Good Dinosaur made a lot less in late 2015. It made a better $562m worldwide, thanks to the globe tracking plot, a 3D bump and an overall expansion of the overseas marketplace, ranking sixth out of 12 Pixar titles at the time. So we’ll see if Cars 3 will continue a downward domestic slide or play better thanks to an entire generation of new youngsters plus over a decade of merchandising madness.

Besides, we know the toys are going to sell like crazy. So if Cars 3 is what gives Pixar/Disney the rope to make Inside Out and Coco, then that’s a small price to pay.  Cars 3 opens June 16, 2017. This comes out just two days before my son’s sixth birthday. And yeah, he wants to see this, even if he wants to see Captain Underpants even more.

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