Pixar is spinning off feature films “Up” and “Cars” as Disney+ series. The Walt Disney Company’s streaming service also ordered a new original series titled “Win or Lose,” as announced Thursday at Disney Investor Day 2020.
The “Up” spinoff, titled “Dug Days,” will premiere in the fall of 2021 and will center on the popular Pixar movie’s golden retriever dog, Dug. The streaming show will follow the pooch, voiced in the movies by Bob Peterson, on his adventures with owner Carl (voiced in the movies by Ed Asner).
Meanwhile, the “Cars” spinoff will follow popular stock car Lightning McQueen (voiced in the movies by Owen Wilson) and premiere in Fall 2022.
In 2009’s “Up,” 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen travels to Paradise Falls in his house equipped with balloons, inadvertently taking a young stowaway. (The “stowaway” as mentioned in the logline is a human boy, not the dog. But the dog clearly made enough of an impression…)
In the original “Cars” in 2006, McQueen — named for late Pixar animator Glenn McQueen and NOT Steve McQueen, as some may assume — gets waylaid in Radiator Springs, where he finds the true meaning of friendship and family. “Cars” has spawned a pair of theatrical sequels, “Cars 2” and “Cars 3.”
Pixar’s third series for Disney+ will be a new original story called “Win or Lose,” which will premiere in fall of 2023. That one comes from a pair of Pixar writers who came up with the idea while working on “Toy Story 4.” The premise of “Win or Lose” stems from the realization that the so-called “Pixar Imagineers,” one a man and one a woman, would regularly walk away from a meeting with polar-opposite takeaways about its events.