Over two decades since the first Toy Story [1] film hit theatres, the beloved Disney-Pixar animated franchise continues to break records [2].
Toy Story 4 [3] — the highly-anticipated fourth instalment in the story about Woody, Buzz, Bo Peep [4], and the rest of Andy's toys — smashed the global box office record for an animated movie. Since opening worldwide on June 20, the film starring Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks [5], and more raked in $238 million. Unfortunately, despite performing well in Europe, Latin America, and the UK (where it set a record by opening with $15 million), Toy Story 4 failed to deliver the ticket sales expected of the film in the US.
So far, the movie has pulled in $118 million at the domestic box office, compared to the $140 million it was expected to. That places it as the fourth-biggest US opening for an animated movie, coming in behind last year's Incredibles 2 [7], 2016's Finding Dory, and 2007's Shrek the Third. Many enthusiastic predictions figured Toy Story 4 would overtake the Incredibles sequel's $182 million American box office bow [8], but so far it seems the ticket sales are still moving slowly even though the Josh Cooley-directed film currently has a 98 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes [9].
Could this mean that US audiences are experiencing a serious case of sequel fatigue? Like Toy Story 4, other additions to longstanding movie studio franchises this Summer have underperformed, like Men in Black: International and X-Men: Dark Phoenix. There still hasn't been any official word about whether Toy Story is getting another sequel [10] or not, but let's hope Pixar decides to let this franchise end for good given how perfectly the fourth film wraps everything up [11].