Early pre-production work seems to have begun at Pixar on JOHN CARTER OF MARS as last week saw the guys working on the movie travel to Edgar Rice Burroughs archives in the ERB, Inc. offices on Ventura Blvd hunting out various artwork and books to stimulate and research ideas for their film. That creative team is said to have included Pixar Vice President Jim Morris along with: director: Andrew Stanton - (A BUG'S LIFE, FINDING NEMO, upcoming WALL-E) writer: Mark Sanders (story supervisor on RATATOUILLE, THE INCREDIBLES) Which would seem to be the team that will be working on JOHN CARTER OF MARS, which came into Disney's hands in January after Paramount let their deal on the franchise expire. Jon Favreau and AICN's honcho Harry Knowles had been working on that adaptation for a number of years. The real interesting news here is that Pixar confirmed to EBRzine that a trilogy is planned, with the first movie coming out before 2012. Which according to Slash Film, leaves the current Pixar schedule looking something like this: June 27, 2008: WALL-E, Andrew Stanton (writer/director of Finding Nemo) 2009: Up, Pete Docter 2010: Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (co-driector of Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo). 2011-2012: Which leaves John Carter of Mars and possibly Brad Birds adaptation of 1906 (unannounced). That would seem to be about right, keeping the structure of one Pixar movie every year. There have been several attempts down the years at a JOHN CARTER OF MARS film adaptation which if you want to be kept up to speed, you can read about here. The source material is just dynamite and Pixar have a track record of producing great movies like no other. This has all the potential in the world and although I would have loved to have seen Brad Bird work on it, it's nice to think that we will get both JOHN CARTER OF MARS and a Bird's 1906 hopefully around the same time. And who knows, if they are doing a trilogy, they could bring Bird on board for later films. JOHN CARTER OF MARS could be a futuristic SINBAD movie. In the hands of Pixar, they are only limited by their imagination for what they can produce.