by: S. Scott Stanikmas

With his debut film The Iron Giant just weeks away from a theatrical re-release, Brad Bird decided to take some time out if his extremely busy schedule to give an update on the highly anticipated Incredibles 2.

Collider caught up with the director, and while he wasn’t too forthcoming with details, he at least told us where he is in the process:

I have the story arc. I’m probably three-quarters through the script, first pass through the script, but we’re already boarding parts of it. I’ve got a lot of people that worked on the first one working on it, so we’re all having a good time with it.

Even though it sounds like he’s deep into it, don’t expect the film to hit theaters anytime soon:

In terms of the release date, we were originally—[the original] Incredibles was supposed to happen after Cars, and our wheels just happened to click a little earlier so they moved us up. Release dates are a little fluid when you’re making films so far in advance. Some films are tougher to come together and tough nuts to crack, and other ones comes together a little more quickly, and so I’m just going to work as fast as I can work well with a relatively small team because I like small teams better until you’ve got everything firmly figured out.

The director is also aware that the landscape has changed since the first film wowed audiences back in 2004. The climate has changed in the superhero genre, but Bird is well aware of that and isn’t trying to replicate anything that’s come before:

…there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out. One of them was X-Men and the other was Spider-Man, and now there are 400 billion of them and there’s a new superhero movie every two weeks. What you don’t want to do is trot over the same turf in the same way everyone else is. So we’re trying to keep it focused in the area that our film was, which was a little bit more about characters and relationships and stuff like that, and see where that takes us.

I still think The Incredibles is one of the best superhero / “comic book” movies ever to come out. It’s the Fantastic Four movie Marvel and Fox wishes it could make. I have the utmost confidence that Brad Bird is putting his heart and soul into this film and that when we finally see the finished product it will have been well worth the wait.