One of last year’s most notable failures was that of “Lightyear,” Pixar’s return to the big screen after several prior releases had been sent directly to the Disney+ service during the pandemic.
Though boasting a rather confusing premise for the audience at large, the spin-off of the “Toy Story” franchise was seen as a fairly safe bet at the box-office – which made its $226.4 million gross a major disappointment, and a costly one considering the film’s $200 million production budget.
The film is best described as “the movie that Toy Story’s Andy watched that made him want the Buzz Lightyear toy”. Even that description wasn’t made very clear in the trailers or marketing for the film which seems to have left many indifferent to the idea of checking out the film. Soft critical reviews also didn’t help.
Pete Docter, the “Up” and “Soul” director and current CCO of Pixar, says the confusion over the film’s existence and place in the “Toy Story” universe is the likely reason it didn’t attract an audience. Speaking with The Wrap, he says:
“We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie. We love the characters and the premise. 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 Angus [MacLane, director], to his credit, took it very seriously and genuinely and wanted to represent those characters as real characters. 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.”
Pixar will be returning to cinemas in the near future with films like “Elemental,” “Elio” and “Inside Out 2” along with the recently announced fifth “Toy Story”.
