However, Toy Story 4 found a graceful way to continue a story that already concluded. So when Toy Story 4 was announced in 2014, there were many skeptical commentators, not unlike myself right now. It was as satisfying a trilogy closer as any we’ve seen in this century. Toy Story 3 made such an impact that even the animation-averse Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Toy Story 3 for Best Picture at the Oscars. And this isn’t just purely a millennial writer’s nostalgia talking. It was an unexpectedly powerful ending, even for Pixar. Andy grows up, the toys fulfill their purpose, and they say goodbye to the child they helped raise. It was intended to be the end of a trilogy. So he gives up his beloved spaceman and cowboy toys, passing Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody on to a little girl named Bonnie. By the time of the 2010 threequel, Andy had been aged up enough to be headed to college, and he had been given the impetus by his mother (and director and co-writer Lee Unkrich) to put childish things away. In the case of Toy Story 3, it’s with a finale that many fans still consider the true conclusion of a story that began in 1995 with a boy named Andy introducing his spaceman toy to his cowboy doll. And yet, every one of those add-ons attempted to do something few other sequels seriously consider in the modern Hollywood model: end things for good. Indeed, the Toy Story franchise is a testament to that, from Pixar refusing to allow Toy Story 2 to be direct-to-video schlock to the studio taking around 10 years for each of the successive follow-ups. In the modern Hollywood climate-which has been largely defined by Iger’s IP-obsession in the 2010s-sequels are inevitable. Most of those films were announced by Iger this week in nearly the same breath it was revealed the company is laying off 7,000 employees. Indeed, if you look at the future slates of both animation studios owned by the Mouse House, it’s a veritable sea of sequels: Inside Out 2, Frozen III, Zootopia 2, and now Toy Story 5. Since that fateful decision, Pixar-and even Walt Disney Animation Studios-have become less averse to making sequels to their beloved classics. Nonetheless, the legacy of Disney’s original movies seemed inexplicably untainted-perhaps because the company visibly didn’t care about the direct-to-video sequels it did produce back then. The company certainly spent the ‘90s exploiting the financial appeal of follow-ups, but these were cheap and quickie affairs, usually only acknowledged by the merchandise arm of the company, and the parents who had to endure watching these soulless cash-ins. In what feels like the increasingly distant past, there was a time when Disney was reluctant to make “official” sequels to their works-which is to say theatrically released films produced by either Walt Disney Animation Studios or the company’s live-action film department. Apparently with both Tom Hanks’ Woody and Tim Allen’s Buzz Lightyear, if Allen’s social media posts are anything to go by. So this week’s news from rechristened Disney CEO Bob Iger wasn’t exactly a shock: Toy Story 5 is on the way. The lack of box office fall-off between installments was remarkable. This was achieved after a nearly decade-long hiatus following the previous film in the Buzz and Woody franchise, Toy Story 3 (2010), which also earned $1 billion. Toy Story 4 grossed a cool $1 billion during the summer of 2019.
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