Pixar Gatto Original Movie Could Be the Studio’s Bravest Bet in Years

Pixar Gatto original movie arrives as a hand painted Venice gamble at a time when sequels still look like the safest bet in animation.

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Pixar is asking us yet again to hand our hearts to a hero who looks, on paper, like a terrible idea. It made the same ask in 1995 with a jealous cowboy doll, in 2007 with a rat who wanted to cook, in 2017 with a boy chasing a song into the land of the dead. The easy question, with the first Gatto trailer now on YouTube, is whether a hand-painted cat in Venice can compete with the sequels stacked on either side of him. The harder one, which Pixar has sweated for most of a decade, is whether the original can survive at all.

At its center is Nero, a scrappy black cat in debt to a feline mob boss in the canal-laced, superstitious city of Venice. Mark Ruffalo gives him a rumpled decency, a tough guy flinching toward something softer; Laurence Fishburne is Rocco, the boss, all velvet and gravel and quiet threat. The minute-long teaser is mostly one joke, three hard cats interrogating a fourth about missing tuna until a swinging lightbulb beats them all. This is a cat movie that understands cats.

It’s also a swerve. Pixar built its empire on glossy computer animation, and Gatto throws that out, rendering Venice as a watercolor somebody taught to breathe. Bold, and dangerous, because boldness and the box office stopped being friends here a while ago. The dread isn’t on the screen. It’s in the ledger.

The brand-new Pixar story has become a hard sell. Inside Out turned a control room of tiny feelings into a small fortune; Coco won the Oscar and stands as the last Pixar original everyone agrees was a clean hit. That was 2017. What followed reads like a slow bruise. Onward opened in 2020, days before the theaters went dark. Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were shipped to Disney+, teaching a generation of parents that a Pixar movie just showed up at home for free. Elio became the lowest-grossing film the studio has ever released.

Still, the original isn’t dead. Hoppers opened this spring and worked, the best start for a Pixar original since Coco, proof the audience never left; they were only waiting for a reason to buy the ticket.

Because here’s the other half of the machine. When an original lands, a sequel is already idling in the driveway. Inside Out became Inside Out 2, briefly the highest-grossing animated film ever made at nearly 1.7 billion dollars. Coco 2 is real now, Monsters, Inc. is getting a third chapter, Incredibles 3 is on the calendar. The original is the gamble. And the surest dollar in animation is a face you already love.

Does the hedge always pay? It doesn’t. Cars 2 is the movie fans reach for to prove that more isn’t the same as better, with Lightyear right beside it.

And then there’s Toy Story, less a franchise than a solar system with its own gravity. Five films now, the fifth in theaters within days, a series that outlived the kids it was made for and keeps minting new ones. It’s the reason every original gets quietly measured for what it might become.

Which loops back to Gatto. No number, no army of fans, no promise a watercolor cat in Venice lands with anyone. Call it the bravest math in animation, a studio that knows which bet is safe and reaches for the other on purpose. For three decades Pixar taught us to fall for the impossible new thing. Gatto is it asking, with real money on the line, whether we still will.

Gatto opens in theaters March 5, 2027. Directed by Enrico Casarosa; produced by Andrea Warren; featuring the voices of Mark Ruffalo and Laurence Fishburne.