Brad Bird is animation’s great blockbuster formalist — the maker who taught the medium to move like live action — yet the project he cares about most has spent nearly two decades as the film nobody will finance. The revealing turn at San Diego Comic-Con was not that 1906 is still alive, but that Bird is now willing to reimagine it as television, the one medium he has never worked in, because that is where a canvas this large can finally be built.

1906 is Bird’s long-planned adaptation of James Dalessandro’s novel, an account of corruption, greed and murder in a San Francisco cracked open by the great earthquake and the fire that followed. He has wanted it as his live-action directing debut for the better part of twenty years, and it has trailed him through every studio detour since.

Those detours are the story of a career: Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, Tomorrowland and Incredibles 2 each pulled Bird back toward projects a studio could underwrite without flinching. A period disaster epic on the scale 1906 demands is exactly the kind of nine-figure live-action bet Hollywood has spent a decade retreating from; at one point Warner Bros. was interested only in carving out the earthquake set piece as a standalone movie.

Television is what changed underneath the project. The prestige limited series has absorbed precisely the sprawling historical canvas theatrical no longer wants to fund, and Bird now frames the story’s scale as an argument for episodes rather than a budget problem. As Deadline reported from the convention, he said the material “would lend itself” to multiple installments — he has imagined it as eight — because “the more you research that time, the more amazing it is,” and “the stories that are happening are insane.” The runtime that once made 1906 unfilmable is the reason a miniseries fits.

The irony is that the director who made The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille feel like event cinema has never directed a minute of it, and he is floating his most cinematic idea as the reason to start. He was at Comic-Con, after all, to sell Ray Gunn, the Skydance Animation noir headed to Netflix — proof he still commands a theatrical lane even as his white whale drifts toward the small screen.

Tags: 1906, Brad Bird, development-hell, Ray Gunn, Skydance Animation