Box Office: ‘Lightyear’ Failed To Learn Lessons Of ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’

Lightyear, Pixar's first full-throated global theatrical release since Onward, opened with a mediocre $50 million over its Fri-Sun frame and around $55 million over the Juneteenth holiday weekend. A Pixar film that was sold as Toy Story 4.5 or Toy Story 0.5 would be a missed opportunity. The movie Andy watched in 1995 made him a fan of Buzz Lightyear.

It is a close approximation toSolo: A Star Wars Story which flopped four years ago and put the kibosh on future Star Wars theatricals. The domestic debut was soft but the global launch was huge.

It is feared that Bob Chapek will designate Pixar as a Disney+ property and see this as a referendum on the brand. Disney's theatrical releases were leggy throughout the year and both Toy Story 4 and Frozen II overcame my concerns. Lightyear gets to just $170 million domestic from an $82 million debut, while Cars 2 and Cars 3 get it to $145 and $55 million, respectively.

The last two Toy Story films were $400 million and $415 million, and Frozen II was $475 million and130 million. It would take a crash like The Good Dinosaur to get it to over 120 million dollars. Audiences generally like it and the reviews are decent.

There was no controversy over a same-sex kiss between two women. DeWanda Wise is a major character in Doctor Strange 2 and she is non-white. Nobody cares that Disney replaced Tim Allen with Chris Evans in order to castrate Buzz Light year. The loss of the marquee actor associated with the character may not have helped, just as Kathleen Kennedy might argue that it was an issue for the film.

No one wanted a prequel origin story comedy based on the co-lead of an established cinematic brand with a different actor in the role. It wasn't Star Wars fatigue, it wasn't "bad marketing", and it wasn't because online troll spiked the narrative for The Last Jedi.

Two years of Disney teaching its consumers to watch its big-budget tentpoles for free or at home for the price of a few tickets is exactly the long-term problem I warned about. When you offer acclaimed, high-quality Pixar flicks at home but then offer the one that is generally considered to be inferior and pitched more at adults in theaters, families might just decide to wait until the next movie.

You are shooting yourself in the foot when you ask when the movie will be available on streaming. By the end of 2022, we may discover that Disney's theatrical power is tied to a number of movies, including Star Wars, and that Disney+ is dependent on a number of Disney toons.

The film may have been greenlit back in 2019. Bob Chapek wanted to keep the Disney+ train running at full steam, so he sent Luca, Soul, and Turning Red to Disney+.

It's cruelly ironic that Lightyear, a white guy's heroic journey/prequel origin story flick, will be released on Disney+ in just 31 days. It is even crueler to know that it is performing poorly.

Lightyear stumbled theatrically because people didn't want to see it.