Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs had some advice for director Brad Bird when he was making decisions about merchandise on the 2004 movie The Incredibles: “fewer things, better things.”
Bird recalled the advice during a recent online chat with Training Day director Antoine Fuqua (who, incidentally, just had his last movie acquired by Apple). Bird also recalled speaking with Jobs about the Apple Store, around the time the company was busy opening the first ones.
Disney’s has been showing us glimpses of its Brad Bird-helmed live action film for some time now, with the slow burn first trailer last October focusing on the young woman who gets a mysterious pin that transports her to an unseen, futuristic world, complete with jetpacks and glittering skylines.
That and present-day George Clooney, who convincingly portrays the curmudgeon next door with secrets of his own.
This new trailer, however, ratchets up the sci-fi action, giving us several more shots of the eponymous future city, even more jetpacks, and a team of future SWAT cops with ray guns coming after our heroine and Clooney as they climb into a bathtub and launch themselves into an uncertain, well, future.
Maybe Tomorrowland won’t be the sappy kid flick we all thought it would turn out to be, after all.
There was more to Walt Disney than Mickey Mouse. He was an obsessive futurist who used his theme parks to stage ideas of what a world filled with cutting-edge technology and the fruits of scientific ambition might look like.
The upcoming movie Tomorrowland is not only a nod to Disney, it re-imagines his vision with the full 21st-century CGI treatment of a world with robots, flying cars and towers reaching into the clouds.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol hits theaters everywhere tomorrow. Surprisingly, the movie actually got really good reviews and is positioned to be one of the top movies of the holiday season. We went and watched the film this weekend at IMAX and enjoyed the dose of big-budget popcorn entertainment that reminded us how huge action movies used to be a lot more fun than the annoying and cringe-worthy action flicks that hit the screen en masse nowadays. Thanks a lot Michael Bay.
The success of Mission Impossible 4 shouldn’t come as a huge surprise though to anyone who is familiar with the director Brad Bird. Having worked at Pixar for a number of years, Bird has directed popular films such as The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, as well as leading the creative teams behind Toy Story 3 and Up. Being a Pixar alum, Bird had the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs and remarks that, “he wasn’t about making something that was going to be cool next week, he was about making something that was going to be cool 100 years from now.”
As a fan of Apple, Bird places Apple products throughout his newest movie and uses them as tools for Ethan Hunt and his team to do some really awesome stuff. Here’s some of the coolest uses of Apple technology in Mission Impossible 4 (we’ll try and keep the spoilers at a minimum).
