The failure of Buzz Lightyear at the cinema? “We asked too much of the public”, judges the boss of Pixar

With 226 million green tickets collected worldwide, Buzz Lightyear, released in theaters in June 2022, is one of the Pixar productions that have performed the least well at the box office.

Presented as a spin-off of the famous Toy Story saga – and more precisely as the film discovered by little Andy before the latter asked for a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday – the feature film landed in the cinema in a context health still tense, while its three predecessors were released directly on Disney +.

But Pete Docter, the boss and co-founder of the studio, attributes this chilly reception to another reason, as he recently declared on the microphone of The Wrap.

“We asked ourselves a lot of questions, because we all love the film. We love the characters and the premise”he confided.

“And (…) what we concluded (…)is that we probably asked too much of the public. (…) When we say ‘Buzz’ to them, they think: ‘Great, where are Mr. Potato Head, Woody and Rex?’ And then we parachuted them into this sci-fi movie (…).

Even if they had read the press, it was a little bit too far off, both in concept and, I think, in the way the characters were drawn, how they were portrayed.”

Without denying the bias of the film, Pete Docter thus points to a discrepancy between the expectations that could be those of the spectators and what they were able to discover at the cinema:

“It was much more of a sci-fi movie, and Angus MacLane [ndlr : le réalisateur], we must admit, took it seriously and sincerely. He wanted to represent these characters as if they were real. But the Toy Story characters are much more marked, so I think there was a disconnect between what people expected and what they were given.”

Buzz Lightyear (the toy) will in any case be back in a few years in Toy Story 5, recently announced by Pixar studios.

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