In a 2014 interview with Grantland, Friedberg and former creative partner Aaron Seltzer shared that after performing rewrites on 1996's Maximum Risk, they sold an animated film to Disney that "turned into Cars", followed by an adaptation of 1999's Little Green Men. According to press notes for their film Scary Movie, Little Green Man was developed in 1999, alongside another project called Motor Mouths. On Seltzer's official website, he lists Pixar Animation Studios, the studio that produced Cars, as one of his clients.
