'Lightyear' Aims at Families This Weekend
by EG
Lightyear, a new Pixar animated family movie that's part of the Toy Story franchise, will hit theaters this weekend, marking the first time in a while that one of the studio's movies is debuting solely in theaters without going straight to Disney's streaming platform. The new release will challenge last week's top movie, Jurassic World: Dominion, for the number-one slot at the box office. Read on for details.
Via Box Office Mojo.
There’s a starman waiting in the sky, and audiences of all ages should flock to see his intergalactic adventures this weekend. 27 years after Pixar launched with Toy Story and revolutionized CG animation, the landmark film’s conceited plastic co-hero, Buzz, finally gets a starring role in Lightyear. The film doesn’t take place in the world of toys, however. Rather, the conceit of the stand-alone sci-fi adventure is that it's the actual 1995 film about the eponymous space ranger (now voiced by Chris Evans) on which the Toy Story "Buzz" toy which Andy received is based. Even if we can’t expect the spinoff to reach the box office highs of the latest Toy Story sequels, it should do strong business over the Father’s Day/Juneteenth weekend.
Lightyear opens in 4,200+ theaters, and after three Disney films going straight to Disney+ in the U.S. (Luca, Soul, and Turning Red), Pixar returns to cinemas with one of their biggest franchises. The third and fourth films in the Toy Story series were the studio’s fourth and third highest grossers respectively in the domestic market, grossing between $415-434 million, and worldwide they rank as Pixar’s second and third biggest grossers, with both films finishing at roughly $1.07 billion. Given Lightyear’s different genre, not to mention just one of the many beloved characters from the classic franchise, these don’t make great comps, but there is no doubt that Buzz Lightyear is a name that will sell a spaceship-load of tickets.
The film’s gross may not go to infinity and beyond, but it should be the top grossing animated film since Frozen II in late 2019. It’s also in the running alongside Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to be the top family film since the start of the pandemic (Sonic 2 opened at $72 million and has a cume of $190 million), and there’s a good chance the Pixar film will come out ahead. The release is well-timed as all of the family options still in theaters (Sonic 2, The Bad Guys, and The Bob's Burgers Movie) have largely run their course, though there is certainly crossover here with the audience of Jurassic World: Dominion, especially for fathers and sons looking for a film to see on Father’s Day.
Competition will come in two weeks when Minions: The Rise Of Gru opens, but that won’t stop Lightyear from playing long, as is typical for animated films in general and Pixar films specifically. Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 opened to $110-121 million, and the films had multipliers of 3.6-3.8, which are standard multipliers for the studio. Excluding Onward, which was released in early March 2020 right when the pandemic was breaking out, all Pixar films with Rotten Tomatoes scores above 80% had multipliers above 3.3 (and the relatively low 3.34 multiplier of Incredibles 2 can be explained away by its massive $183 million opening). Lightyear’s reviews don’t put it in the top tier of Pixar films, but at 82% on Rotten Tomatoes it looks like it will continue the studio’s streak of family favorites.
Previews started from Wednesday at 6pm on IMAX and other PLF screens and Thursday at 3pm on normal screens. Worldwide it opens in most markets this week, though France has to wait a week and Japan has to wait two weeks, while as of now there is no release in China, Russia, Malaysia, Indonesia, and much of the Middle East.
Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.