Pixar's Ocean's 11. Soul features the voice of Jamie Foxx as Joe Gardner, a jazz musician and teacher whose soul gets separated from his body. The film centers on Joe's journey to re his soul with his body on Earth, along with the help of a far more cynical soul named 22 (voiced by Tina Fey). Soul is directed by Pete Docter, Pixar's longtime exec and filmmaker who's directed some of the studio's most successful and beloved movies like Monsters Inc., Up, and Inside Out.
It looks like Docter has crafted yet another masterpiece, as some critics are already calling it one of Pixar's best movies ever. Early reviews rapturously praised the film's story and sublime examination of what it means to be human, further elevating Pixar's reputation for expertly smuggling weighty existential themes into animated children's movies. However, it looks like Soul's plot went through many drastic changes from the development stage to the final product. In fact, one of Docter's early concepts mirrored a beloved, star-studded blockbuster released 19 years ago.
The story team behind Soul told Collider that one of the first drafts of the movie involved heist elements similar to the 2001 film Ocean's 11. According to story supervisor Kristen Lester, this version of the movie saw Joe travel back through different parts of his life and perform heist-related activities. The story team eventually discarded the idea, arguing it was too strange and didn't do justice to the story's central question of what it means to have purpose in life. Here's Lester's quote regarding Soul's original Ocean's 11 connection below:
All our movies take very different paths and you'd be shocked at what you saw when stuff was early in development to where it ended up being. Sometimes they're very, very, very different movies and yeah, the first sketch of the movie, it was more of a heist movie that Joe was trying to go back to his life basically through, I can't , doing a bunch of heist-y stuff. And I we came to the end of that version of the movie and it just felt like, again, like I talked about, doing honor to the subject matter and the thing that it was exploring, which is what gives life meaning, what is our purpose in life? The questions that Pete was answering. And it felt like that version of the movie wasn't doing that justice, and so we had to take out... Okay, it's not Ocean's 11. What can we do to dig deeper into the thing that people really wanted to talk about?
Lester said the Ocean's 11 storyline wasn't the only crazy idea that didn't make it past the development stage. Another idea involved Joe and 22 pretending to be counselors by standing on each other in an oversized trench coat and sneaking through the film's You Seminar, which is the movie's primary exposition device on how the soul world works. She explained that the scene and the trench coat aspect in particular weren't very believable, ultimately causing it to be rejected.
There have been many popular movies like Soul whose final cuts starkly contrasted their early concepts. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck originally conceived Good Will Hunting, a drama about the relationship between a young genius and his troubled therapist that went on to score nine Oscar nominations, as a conspiracy thriller. The titular alien in E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, which concerns the heartwarming friendship between an alien and a young boy and is widely considered among the greatest kids movies ever made, was supposed to be hostile toward humans before Spielberg discarded that crucial detail. While it's always fun to imagine how these what-ifs would have played out on screen, creators like the ones at Pixar who boast decades of storytelling experience have proven quite talented at knowing when something works and when something doesn't.
Source: Collider
