1906
Brad Bird tried to turn the San Francisco earthquake into Pixar's first live-action epic, but three studios could not reduce the scale or agree on the story.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- detailed preproduction
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
An unmade historical disaster film developed by Brad Bird with Pixar, Disney and Warner Bros.
The film would combine political corruption, firefighting and personal stories around the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
Existence timeline
The director works from James Dalessandro's material.
Pixar, Disney and Warner Bros. share development.
The historical epic grows in scale.
The screenplay is repeatedly reduced.
Mission: Impossible and Tomorrowland take priority.
Bird considers combining film and television forms.
Why it ended
The screenplay and budget remained too large, and Bird moved to other projects.
Last confirmed trace
Drafts, research, interviews and later discussion of a possible television form preserve the project.
What it left behind
1906 marks Pixar's most prominent attempt to develop a primarily live-action feature.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to detailed_preproduction under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.