'The Incredibles 2' Finally Has A Release Date

Disney's unveiling of their planned cinematic calendar for the next few years has yielded a few surprises — Ant-Man getting a sequel, and soon; Captain Marvel has been pushed back a few months; Black Panther brought forward, etc — but arguably the announcement with most cause for great excitement has to do with The Incredibles 2 and its long, long-awaited release date.

As CBR confirms, the eagerly anticipated sequel to director Brad Bird's 2004 magnum opus acclaimed animation will step into the light on 21 June 2019, about four months shy of being a full 15 years since we were first introduced to, and fell in love with, super-powered parents Bob & Helen Parr and their children Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack. 

In conjunction with unveiling The Incredibles sequel's release, Disney also announced a further five Pixar films in the works — two original properties (Coco, due 22 November 2017, and Gigantic, out 9 March 2018) and three other sequels, including Toy Story 4 (which moves back from June 2017 to 15 June 2018) and Cars 3 (16 June 2017), for some reason.

For those worried about the prospects of a sequel (a) to one of the greatest standalone animated films of the 21st century, if not in history and (b) that comes more than a decade after the original, you can take some solace in the fact that Bird (who cut his teeth as a creative consultant during the first eight seasons of The Simpsons) is well aware that the sequel can't be the same movie it would have been had it been released in the immediate wake of The Incredibles.

"What's changed is there were only two other superhero franchises at the time Incredibles came out," he told CBR. "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."

In addition to its stacked decks with Pixar and Marvel films, Disney also announced plans for films — most untitled — through till 2020, with live-action 'remakes' of their classic animated properties (ie Cinderella, Maleficent) tipped to be the area of focus for the company on as-yet-unidentified movies due for release on 22 December 2017, 2 November 2018, 29 March 2019 and 8 November 2019.

You can see Disney's full schedule of films as it stands for the next five years via Deadline.

Also, this is hands-down still one of the best sequences in any superhero movie ever: