Pixar's chief creative officer, Pete Docter, has broken Josh O'Connor's Ratatouille loving heart when he told TIME that the idea of remaking the studio's animated film into live action “sort of bothers me.”

However, he's aware that bucking the trend may not work out for him, “This might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me.”

“To remake it, it's not very interesting to me personally,” he explained.

Docter said this in response to the question about possibly having seen the online campaign for O'Connor – a long-time fan of Pixar's 2007 film Ratatouille — to play the live-action version of Alfredo Linguini.

Pixar to Josh O'Connor: It's a ‘non'

Challengers star Josh O'Connor.

The CCO said that casting him would most likely not happen. Also, he thinks that it may be quite challenging to make “a live-action rat cute.”

It's not just Ratatouille that Docter doesn't want to adapt into a live-action feature.

“So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world,” he said.

“So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?' But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I'll buy it.' The worlds that we've built just don't translate very easily,” Docter explained.

The interview was released only a few days before Pixar releases Inside Out 2. The Pixar chief said he knows there's a lot riding on how the public receives the sequel to the massively popular 2015 movie.

“If this doesn't do well at the theater, I think it just means we're going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business,” he elaborated. The studio's last two releases, 2022's Lightyear and last year's Elemental weren't exactly box office hits. Lightyear earned a global box office return of $226.4 million ($50.6 million from domestic opening) while Elemental made $496.4 million worldwide, $29.6 million of that from domestic opening.

It might have something to do with the COVID-19 pandemic that gripped the world since the films released from 2020 didn't come close never came near the $500-million mark that Pixar movies used to make.

Sequels vs. originals

Docter also acknowledged that the studio is struggling between producing sequels versus original content.

“Part of our strategy is to try to balance our output with more sequels. It's hard. Everybody says, “Why don't they do more original stuff?' And then when we do, people don't see it because they're not familiar with it,” he stated.

“With sequels, people think, ‘Oh, I've seen that. I know that I like it.' Sequels are very valuable that way,” the Pixar chief explained.

Playing the numbers game, Docter is right that Pixar's sequels have been very valuable. When we look at the movie with the most number of sequels, Toy Story (which has three): in 1995, the first movie made $394.4 million worldwide; in 1999, the second made $497.4 million; in 2010, the third earned $1.07 billion, the first Pixar film to reach and break the $1 billion mark in global box office returns; and its fourth made roughly the same at $1.07 billion worldwide.

The Pixar project with the second most number of sequels, Cars (which has two), didn't do as well as Toy Story in the sense that it didn't reach $1 billion, but still the first, released in 2006 made a respectable $462 million worldwide; the second released in 2011 made $559.85 million and the third earned $383.9 million.

There are four franchises that have one sequel each, including Inside Out, but since it hasn't been released yet, let's not count it. Monster's Inc., released in 2001, made $549.7 million, the first Pixar movie to reach and break the $500 million global box office returns. Its 2013 sequel Monsters University earned even more at $743.56 million.

In 2003, Finding Nemo almost broke the $1 billion mark at $94.6 million, but it made for it since its sequel, 2016's Finding Dory, made $1.03 billion. The Incredibles was released in 2004 and made $631.7 million while its sequel is, to date, the highest grossing Pixar movie earning $1.24 billion.

Docter and the rest of the studio will have to wait and see if Inside Out 2 will surpass its predecessor's $858.85 million global box office earnings. But do you think Pixar should consider making a hybrid live-action/animated movie just to test the waters? Or is there time to change the creative chief's mind and unbreak O'Connor's heart?