Lightyear was released last year to mostly positive reviews (it has a respectable 74% on Rotten Tomatoes), but it was far from the critical darling most Pixar movies are.
More importantly, it made only $226 million at the worldwide box office on a $200 million budget. A rare flop for the studio, many pundits have since questioned what went wrong with the movie. The sci-fi tale followed the "real" Buzz Lightyear with Chris Evans lending his voice to the Space Ranger in place of Tim Allen.
It was supposed to be the movie that a young Andy watched before getting a Buzz action figure for his birthday, an idea that served as an undeniably clever way to expand the Toy Story franchise beyond, well, toys.
Talking to The Wrap, Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter got candid about why he believes Lightyear didn't resonate with audiences.
"We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie. We love the characters and the premise," he tells the trade. "I think probably what we’ve ended on in terms of what went wrong is that we asked too much of the audience."
"When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, 'What?' Even if they’ve read the material in press, it was just a little too distant, both in concept, and I think in the way that characters were drawn, that they were portrayed. It was much more of a science fiction."
"And [director] Angus [MacClane], to his credit, took it very seriously and genuinely and wanted to represent those characters as real characters," Docter continues. "But the characters in ‘Toy Story’ are much broader, and so I think there was a disconnect between what people wanted/expected and what we were giving to them."
Based on these comments, we can probably forget about seeing any further Toy Story spin-offs in this vein, while Lightyear was almost certainly a one-off after those disappointing box office takings.
On the plus side, Toy Story 5 is on the way, and you can find out what the Pixar boss had to say about that right here.