Andrew Stanton Leads Toy Story 5 to June 12 Release
Andrew Stanton is co-writing and co-directing toy story 5, which is scheduled to reach theaters on June 12. The film extends a Pixar franchise he has shaped for more than half his life, after the last two installments each made more than a billion dollars.
Stanton and the Toy Story timeline
Stanton has worked on the franchise for 34 years and said he was the lead writer on the first three Toy Story movies before becoming a script savior on the fourth. Around 2008, he said, the story for Toy Story 3 finally clicked: “What if it went farther? What if it was a trilogy with one kid, closed that up, handed it off to another kid and started another one?”
That idea led him and the team to decide Toy Story 3 would close the Andy chapter as the character went off to college. Stanton said Toy Story 4 opened the Bonnie years, and the run from 2 through 4 left the franchise with a long enough history to make another sequel feel like a business decision as much as a creative one.
June 12 and the billion-dollar bar
“They make it sound like old blockbuster thinking,” Stanton said, addressing the numbers attached to the franchise. His point lands because the past two Toy Story movies each cleared more than a billion dollars, a threshold that keeps the series in Pixar’s highest-stakes lane heading into summer.
Stanton also said, “The culture’s changed in the last 15 years. We all understand binging now. We all understand episodic stories. Not everything’s great for it, but some are and the Toy Story world is meant for that kind of lengthy thinking.”
Why Stanton said yes
When asked to return, Stanton said, “I was skeptical at first because I didn’t know if where I would want to see it go would match with where the studio would want to see go.” He said he then chose to write the first draft anyway: “I cautiously said, let me write the crappy first draft, because I always write a crappy first draft, but at least I’ll figure out myself where I’d like to see it go just as a fan, let alone somebody that’s been behind the camera with it.”
That is the practical read on toy story 5: Pixar is putting one of its longest-running architects back on the front line for a June 12 release, and the company is betting the franchise still has room to grow after an 11-year gap between Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 and nine more years before the fourth film.
