Toy Story is on tap for summer, 2026, and it looks like the main cast will all be back! Logline: Bonnie is going to get a new toy called Lily Pad, a touchpad ‘friend’ who will try to separate her from her other toys. #MechaLily
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-5-plot-details-sheriff-jesse-pete-docter/
LLM? Master’s of Laws degrees?
Sorry, Large Language Models (AI personal chatbots, in this case). Sorry about that, I was paralleling the name of a different franchise.
I have a theory that movie series always end with two bad installments. See, you start out with one movie. And maybe it’s good. If so, then lots of people will go see it, and it’ll make money, and the execs will notice. So they make a sequel, and maybe that’s good too, and the cycle continues.
But eventually, they make a bad one. And at first, people won’t know that it’s bad, because they haven’t seen it yet. And they know that the other ones in the series were good, and so they’ll still go to see it, and only then discover that it’s bad. But meanwhile, the movie still makes a lot of money, and so the studio makes another sequel.
But now, if that sequel is bad, too, now people are forewarned of the possibility. So everyone says “Eh, I’ll wait until other people see it, or the reviews come out”. And the few people who do see it say that it’s bad, and so everyone else decides that they won’t see it after all. And so when the second bad movie in a row comes out, that one doesn’t make money, and so that’s when the studio execs get the message that they shouldn’t make any more.
I just saw this. It’s currently getting a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics (95% audience score).
Personally, I thought it was pretty good, but not great. Overall, I loved the first two installments of the franchise, but each subsequent installment has gone downhill in my estimation.
I said:
I mentioned in the annoying commercials thread that I saw an AT&T commercial that ends with Bonnie playing with her mother’s smartphone. Given that the whole movie is about how kids should play with traditional toys and not electronics, that seemed a bit ironic.
I find a series starts to lose its youmph when the films get more and more deep into the world, and you start to question the basic premise.
Toy Story was great. You didn’t have to contemplate the infinite to enjoy it. But by the third, when the toys are in actual peril, now they made it a plot point.
Like, do all toys have a (for lack of a better word) soul? Do they live forever? What happens if you cut the head off a doll and put it on a car? Which personality dominates? What happens to the doll’s body?
And if a toy gets thrown into the landfill, does it lay there, alone, trapped, in the dark, forever? Without even the promise of death as a release from their suffering?
Don’t raise these questions if you’re not going to answer them!
JAQ: have not seen Toy Story 4 or 5
eta: The Cars franchise is the same. Why are cars acting like humans, when there is no reason to?
A toy is a toy by virtue of being something a child plays with. Compare Sporky, who turned from inanimate trash to a “live” toy when Bonnie started playing with it. So I’d imagine that a toy that is no longer played with, and which nobody remembers playing with, “dies”.
Fair enough, but, toys are shown sentient in their packaging. So they come pre-souled, as it were. For my sentimentality, I hope unloved toys “die”, because the thought of a toy trapped in a dump, or abandoned in an old building or field, is terribly sad. Otherwise, they’ll be there until the sun goes nova.
If humans knew! They’re torturing sentient beings!
Hmm… And I suppose it’s also possible that some kid loses a toy in the backyard and it gets buried, and the kid grows old and dies (so they definitely don’t remember it, and their descendants never heard of it), but then, decades later, a descendant (or a descendant of whoever bought the house) is digging in the backyard and finds it and starts playing with it again. Would the toy remember its previous owner, or does it get a completely new personality then?
Actually, for that matter, Woody originally belonged to Andy’s dad. Is there any indication that he remembers that? And while toys on store shelves do have some degree of life, they seem to have much less developed personalities than played-with toys do, based on the “story”, such as it is, that they’re packaged with.
So I think that maybe a toy’s life is an extension of the child’s life, and that the rudimentary life of toys on a store shelf is based on the collective expectations of all children who want to buy one.
These are very existential, philosophical questions, the kind brilliant minds have been debating thousands of years. I don’t think the film writers gave it any thought at all.
Which, going back, is why I love TS1, enjoyed 2, started getting annoyed by 3, and haven’t watched the last 2.
On the contrary, I’m sure they have. You can tell because they have touched on this sort of thing very lightly. It’s just that if you delve too deeply into this, it stops being a movie suitable for children.
Contrast “children grow up and leave their toys behind” with “sentient abandoned toys are condemned to eternal life in limbo after being discarded.”
I saw it - I enjoyed it well enough. The electronics theme has been done a lot, and is better in other places (Nothing will beat the Shaun the Sheep joke were a parent records themself reading a bedtime story, and just plays that on an iPad when the kid asks them to read to them), but the theme about growing up is one that Toy Story needed, and was very well done and emotional.
This is actually an interesting hypothesis. Can you provide any examples of where this has played out?
I agree.
It’s a good contrast to my unkillable franchise theory.
Which is, franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek really only have like two good films. The rest are varying degrees of suck, but we all want them to be good. We keep watching them, hanging on to the tiny nuggets of goodness in each one, and saying, “well, the next one will be better!” And they never are. But we keep hoping, and buying our tickets, and they keep making them. And we cling to the hope, the promise, the image of the good films they could make, if they tried, and tell ourselves, “Well, it wasn’t that bad.” But it really was.
I’m even willing to grant some leeway for what constitutes ‘good’. After all, I’m not the final arbiter of taste.
Well, it gets fuzzy with franchises that get rebooted decades later. But the Alien series had two good movies and two bad ones, and then went dormant a while. Star Trek was able to keep on going with alternating good and bad, until they hit two bad ones in a row, and then died (until the reboots). Highlander had one good movie and then two bad ones.
I know I found some more examples, too, but I can’t remember them…
keep going…
For the Pixar studio, The Incredibles had one incredibly (sorry!) good movie and one bad one. Everyone went to see the second one because the first one was so good. The second one wasn’t nearly as good, though.
I bet they make another one. If it’s bad as well, that will likely be it for the franchise…unless they try to reboot it again in twenty years.