Warning! Spoilers Ahead for Lightyear.
Screen Rant's Pitch Meeting series continues to poke fun at newly released movies with its latest entry on Lightyear. Lightyear is the spinoff movie of the Toy Story franchise, which gives the background of Andy's beloved toy space ranger played by Tim Allen in the four original films. Helmed by director Angus MacLane and premiering in June 2022, it is the first Pixar movie to receive a worldwide release since Onward in March 2020. Lightyear has somewhat underperformed box office expectations, making $101 million worldwide against its $200 million budget.
Lightyear uses a framing device to explain that this is the movie Andy saw in 1995, which inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy line. In the movie itself, Star Command is exploring a habitable planet, T'Kani Prime, but discovers that hostile lifeforms live there. Buzz, played by Chris Evans in Lightyear, damages their ship in the escape effort, forcing the crew to settle on the planet, and a year later, a colony has formed that finally has the infrastructure to make the needed repairs. Buzz, wanting to fix his mistake, volunteers to test the hyperspace fuel. The test takes four minutes for him, but four years pass on the planet thanks to time dilation. The rest of the movie sees Buzz continuing tests as the planet and his companions age around him.
Now, following the somewhat mediocre box-office reception of Lightyear, Ryan George's writer and Pixar executive play out the original pitch of the movie in the newest Pitch Meeting episode. Among other things, George highlights the confusing framing premise, the mismatched tones of this serious supposed 90s action movie and the reality of the fun and campy movies that were really released in 1995, and the odd contradiction that Zurg is an older version of Buzz in Lightyear instead of Buzz's father as was established in Toy Story 2. You can see the whole episode below:
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Much like the Pitch Meeting points out, the framing device and time dilation aspects of the film are a bit complicated for adults to understand, let alone the children of the movie's target audience. Not only that, but the other characters from the Toy Story films are absent. It could be argued that the success of the original movies was the ensemble cast, and trusting Buzz to carry a movie on his own is an interesting gamble, which has not completely paid off.
Like many other Pitch Meetings, such as for Jurassic World Dominion, a main criticism is the return to existing properties rather than exploring new ideas. The past success of Toy Story is expected to carry this movie. Also, the clear merchandising opportunities of characters like Sox the cat is a pretty clear cash grab. George aptly points this out, stating that if Andy really had seen Lightyear in 1995, he probably would have wanted a Sox toy rather than a Buzz Lightyear action figure, thus making Toy Story just a bit more far-fetched.
Source: Pitch Meeting
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