I'm purposely choosing to respond to this because I'm not in the mood for more "leak talk".
Thanks Cosmodore for bringing this movie back up. It only makes me angry how much Pixar ****ed up a great concept...
What irritates more than anything is how people regard this as Pixar's lowest moment due to how little cash it raked in. The movie itself wasn't bad. A tad slow at times, and maybe the cast could've been a little bigger, but the film was still well within C+ territory.
The REAL turning point was Cars 2. Everything about it felt like a blatant cash grab. The story was awful, it had little to no meaningful character development, and instead of focusing on racing and stuff actually relevant to a world full of talking cars, they went with some generic secret agent shtick.