Pixar unveiled a big new project Friday night at D23 Expo with its promotion for “Hoppers,” a body-swap story starring Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan and Piper Curda. The story follows a young girl, Mabel, who can transfer her mind into a robot beaver with the goal of infiltrating the animal kingdom. It’s targeted for release in spring 2026.
Hamm, an Emmy winner for “Mad Men” and nominee this year for FX’s “Fargo,” will voice the Mayor trying to destroy the beaver’s home. Curda, who voices Mabel, is a former Disney Channel star who appeared in multiple episodes of the 2013-214 series “A.N.
T Farm.” She also was featured in multiple episodes of the 2018-2022 CW superhero series “Legacies.” Pixar’s unveiling of its next big-screen project comes after a big summer for Disney’s beloved animation unit, with “Inside Out 2” dominating the box office after it released in June.
The sequel released nine years after the original “Inside Out” and managed to surpass the bar set by the original. Riley, who was a young girl in the first “Inside Out,” is now a teenager and attends a hockey summer camp with her friends. However, puberty is wreaking havoc on her emotions, so she must navigate her middle school friends moving away while also impressing the high school girls.
The sequel made a massive $1.5 billion at the global box office and stands as the highest-grossing animated movie in history. The film jolted Pixar from its recent box office slump, after underwhelming performances from “Lightyear,” “Turning Red” and “Luca,” and became the 10th highest-grossing film of all time.
In 2025, Pixar has “Elio,” a space adventure featuring the voices of America Ferrera, Jameela Jamil and more. The logline reads: “The original feature film introduces Elio, an underdog with an active imagination who finds himself inadvertently beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, and completely unprepared for that kind of pressure, Elio must form new bonds with eccentric alien lifeforms, survive a series of formidable trials and somehow discover who he is truly meant to be.
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