Nipping at the heels of this morning’s teaser reveal, one designed to place fans on red alert ahead of this weekend’s full-length trailer, Entertainment Weekly has peeled back the curtain on Cars 3, Brian Fee’s animated sequel out to recapture the rip-roaring spirit of John Lasseter’s 2006 original.
That’s not to say Cars 2 was a total write-off – a $560 million worldwide cume is not to be balked at – but six months out from the release of Cars 3, there’s a general feeling online that Fee’s threequel has the potential to steer Pixar’s popular racing series back on course. It’ll once again involve franchise star Lightning McQueen, and we now have confirmation of two actors who will be joining Owen Wilson in the voice booth: Armie Hammer of Nocturnal Animals fame and Cristela Alonzo, creator of hit TV series Cristela.
The former will get behind the wheel of Jackson Storm, the hot up-and-coming racer who views McQueen as nothing more than a washed-up has-been. Brian Fee, who’s making his Pixar debut with Cars 3, shared some new character details with EW in a recent interview, saying:
“McQueen is not the young hotshot anymore, the kid he was back then in Cars 1. He’s in the middle of his life, and as an athlete, that’s getting up there. You have your whole life ahead of you, yet your career is starting to show its age. He’s looking in the mirror and realizing, ‘I’m 40 years old,’ and dealing with the fact that the thing that you love more than anything else, you might not be able to do forever.”
In terms of the actual rivalry between McQueen and Storm, the latter is essentially the new fan-favorite – a hotshot racer that typically finds everything falling in his favor.
“Jackson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Everything comes easy to him, and everything about him says he’s faster, so much so that we’ve designed him so that even when he’s standing next to McQueen, McQueen looks old… He thinks the world is his. He’s taking over. He’s owed it. In a very broad term, I think of old football players with those little leather skull caps, and you think of football players now with all their armor, hitting so hard. It’s not the same game. What they did was not anything like what we do now. And that’s Jackson: He thinks the future of racing and the high-tech ways they train and what they can do means they’re taking the sport to a new level, and the older guys had their day, and it’s done, and they have no place in the future of racing.”
Cars 3 opens on June 16, 2017 and remember, the full-length trailer will be with us over the coming days, so be sure to stay tuned to We Got This Covered for more.
