It seems like Toy Story is getting sequels to infinity and beyond, whether we like it or not. While Toy Story 5 was initially announced back in February (alongside the grimmer news of 7,000 company layoffs), it seems like the studio is actually starting to move forward with the project. Does this mean the recently teased Frozen 4 is actually real, even though Frozen 3 hasn’t even come out yet? Probably! CEO Bob Iger couldn’t leave all the franchise fatigue to the superheroes, could he? That would be ridiculous.
Still, at least one person seems cautiously optimistic about the fifth Toy Story installment, and that’s Buzz Lightyear himself, Tim Allen. “Bob Iger, the head of Disney, said it was on. He actually said it was going to happen,” said Allen in a recent appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “They have reached out to Tom [Hanks] and I to reprise the roles.”
After the critically adored Toy Story 3 gave Woody and Co. a satisfying, tear-jerking ending, critics expressed a healthy skepticism about the existence of 2019's Toy Story 4. However, that film—and Tony Hale’s angsty Forky—became a huge hit, raking in over $1 billion at the global box office and garnering generally positive reviews (The A.V. Club gave it a “B”). But Toy Story 4 also included a pretty final-feeling ending—(spoilers!) Woody goes off to join Bo Peep at the carnival while Buzz and the rest of the gang depart for Bonnie’s house—which Allen knows.
“You wonder if four was too many, is five too much?” he continued, before reiterating that this wasn’t actually that much of a concern for him. “According to the scuttlebutts, the writer that’s doing [Toy Story 5] wrote one of the better [Toy Story films] and he said, ‘If I didn’t get this right, I wouldn’t do it.’ So it could be a very, very interesting way to reunite it.” Maybe the real story here is which of the four films Allen thinks is “one of the better ones”... or which one isn’t. For what it’s worth, our money for that is on Lightyear.