Movie Polout May 10, 2025 0 Comments

Disney Spent Over $30 Million On A Spin-Off That Will Likely Never Happen

Dusty Crophopper posing on a launchpad in Planes

Walt Disney Pictures

There are few names that get Disney historians to raise their eyebrows like Disneytoon. The studio behind the Mouse House’s direct-to-home-media racket from 1990 to 2018, Disneytoon was tasked with knocking out sequels, prequels, and spin-offs to its parent company’s biggest animated films as quickly and, just as importantly, cheaply as possible. The results weren’t exactly Disney magic, but you can’t blame the studio’s artists for doing what they could. In the end, they made 47 (!) animated movies in three decades, and hey: They helped give us Al’s hot dad Cassim (John Rhys-Davies) from “Aladdin and the King of Thieves” and the generational cult classic that is “A Goofy Movie,” so you gotta show them some respect.

This brings us to today’s specific topic: “Planes.” Directed by Klay Hall (“Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure”), it’s an odd duck among Disneytoon’s output, being a theatrical release based on Pixar’s “Cars” franchise. The 2013 film was originally meant to head straight to DVD and Blu-ray (like most Disneytoon titles), but that changed after Disney recognized its commercial viability. What’s more, the “Planes” concept itself was cooked up by former Pixar boss John Lasseter, who received a “story by” credit for his efforts. (Obviously, this was before his fall from grace. More on that later.)

Not only that, but “Planes” was also part of Lasseter’s larger vision for a series of spin-offs centered around assorted anthropomorphized vehicles that reside in the unseen corners of the “Cars” universe. In fact, the film actually opens with a banner declaring it takes place in the “World of ‘Cars.'” (Say what you will, but it’s still less clunky than “From the World of John Wick”.) Like so many prospective cinematic universes in the 2010s, though, it wasn’t meant to be … which is how Disney wound up spending millions on a “Planes” feature that never came to fruition.

Planes 3 cost Disney millions of dollars without ever actually happening

Dusty and his fellow rescue vehicles in Planes: Fire & Rescue

Walt Disney Pictures

While the “Cars” films have a (not entirely unwarranted) reputation for being narratively unadventurous, the “Planes” movies keep things even simpler. “Planes,” for example, is a by-the-book sports story about an underdog in the form of Dusty Crophopper, an affable crop duster and wannabe world-famous racer voiced by Dane Cook. Likewise, the 2014 sequel “Planes: Fire & Rescue” (which saw future “Monsters at Work” showrunner Bobs Gannaway replace Hall at the helm) forces Dusty to grow up a little by having him set out to become a wildland firefighter.

For the most part, the “Planes” films are innocuous (their reliance on certain insensitive stereotypes aside); they just don’t have much going on beneath the — apologies — hood compared to Disney and Pixar’s best output. That goes double for their animation, which is noticeably less sophisticated and detailed than even Pixar’s lesser work from the same era.

Not that it’s really fair to compare them; both “Planes” and “Fire & Rescue” cost $50 million apiece at a time when Pixar’s features regularly came with a $200 million price tag. Besides, all that mattered to the ol’ House of Mouse was that they were quite profitable, taking in almost $400 million at the box office combined. That also made green-lighting “Planes 3” at a similar budget an easy decision … and all the more shocking when the movie was indefinitely delayed in March 2018, at which point Disney had already invested $34.7 million into making it (per Forbes).

Developed under the working title “Space,” the “Planes” threequel would have sent two planes — including, one presumes, Dusty — “to the edge of the atmosphere.” Instead, it (sigh, here we go again) crashed and burned during takeoff. So, how did everything go so wrong?

Planes 3 was killed by the rise of streaming (and, probably, the Lasseter scandal)

Dusty and Blade Ranger flying over a forest in Planes: Fire and Rescue

Walt Disney Pictures

Three months after “Planes 3” and its other developing “Cars” spin-offs were canceled (including the bizarre-sounding “Metro”), Disneytoon shuttered its doors for good. This was partly the result of the onset of streaming and the shrinking home media market, which was still the main reason the studio even existed. Disney’s decision to then try and compete with Netflix directly by launching Disney+ was more or less the final nail in the coffin for the studio (which had previously made the company millions in VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray sales).

It’s possible, at the time, spending $35 million on “Planes 3” may’ve seemed like chump change for the billion-dollar giant, which is why it never bothered to finish the movie. (It’s projected the sequel wouldn’t have cost much more than its predecessors, so it must’ve been fairly far along.) That’s assuming the Mouse House didn’t pull a David Zaslav and use “Planes 3” as a tax write-off. The company refrained from commenting on Forbes’ report, so read into that what you will.

We also shouldn’t forget that Lasseter took an extended leave of absence from Disney and Pixar after sexual harassment allegations were raised against him in 2017, resulting in him stepping down for good the following year. Given that “Planes” and the rest of the “Cars”-verse was his brainchild, it’s probably not a coincidence the whole endeavor was abandoned around the same time.

Regardless, it was an inglorious end for not just the “Planes” films but also Disneytoon at large. Again, you have to feel for the studio’s employees; say what you will about their art, but those hard-working animators spent decades doing exactly what they were hired for, only to find themselves out of luck for reasons beyond their control. Did Disneytoon itself deserve better? I’ll let you be the judge of that.