Toy Story 5 Just Became Pixar's Biggest Movie Ever. This Saturday, Disney Lays Off the People Who Helped Build It

I want to start with the number, because it's a genuinely good number and I don't want the rest of this piece to bury it: Toy Story 5 has grossed $1.144 billion worldwide, which makes it the highest-grossing movie in the Toy Story franchise's thirty-one-year history, ahead of Toy Story 3's $1.069 billion and Toy Story 4's $1.071 billion. It did that with a $250 million budget, a 94% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, an A CinemaScore, and — per early tracking that held up through the film's run — the best audience (Popcornmeter) rating any Toy Story movie has received. Every single film in this series has now opened above 90% with critics. I don't know another franchise that can say that after five installments and three decades, and I'm including the ones I love more.

Now the other number. This Saturday, September 26, a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the state of California takes effect, and it puts roughly 108 people out of work at Pixar's Emeryville, California headquarters — editors, technical directors, story artists, and software engineers among them, according to the filing as reported by Fast Company. Some outlets put the figure closer to 116; Disney hasn't confirmed an exact number. Either way, it's the studio's largest round of cuts since 2024, and it's landing three months after the movie those same departments helped ship became the biggest hit of Pixar's year, and one of the biggest of the year for anyone.

I don't think that makes Toy Story 5 a bad movie, and I don't think it makes the people running Disney cartoon villains either — the real explanation is duller and more structural than that, and I'll get into it. But I've spent two weeks trying to write about this film as just a box office story, and I keep failing, because the film itself is about a kid choosing between her toys and a tablet, and the real-world footnote to its box office run is a studio trimming the humans who animate those toys by hand. That's not a metaphor I invented for a headline. It's just what actually happened, in the same summer, to the same company.

The numbers, because they're actually worth sitting with

Toy Story 5 opened June 19 to $160 million domestic, a franchise record and the second-biggest opening weekend any animated film has ever had, trailing only Incredibles 2's $182.6 million from 2018. Its worldwide opening weekend hit $312 million, the second-best global start in Pixar's history behind Inside Out 2's $384 million. It crossed $1 billion by late July, becoming the sixth Pixar film ever to do it, and closed its run at $480.26 million domestically — third among all 2026 releases behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey — and $1.144 billion worldwide, tenth among every animated film ever made.

Here's the part that made me sit up: every one of the five Toy Story movies has landed above 90% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, which as far as I can tell makes it the highest-rated multi-film franchise the site has ever tracked. That's not marketing language. Go look for another five-film series that's never dipped below 90%. I couldn't find one either.

Two things jump out of that table for me. One is that Toy Story 5's critics' score is its lowest of the five, and it's still a number most franchises would sell a limb for. The other is that the domestic openings basically double every decade — $29 million, then $110 million, then $160 million, roughly one Toy Story generation raising the last one's ceiling. That's either a franchise that keeps genuinely delivering, or an audience that's been trained for thirty-one years to show up opening weekend no matter what. I happen to think it's mostly the first thing, but I'll admit I'm not a neutral witness — I was six when the first one came out, and Woody's voice is tangled up with my own childhood in a way I can't fully separate from the review.

What actually happens on screen, without spoiling the ending

Toy Story 5 picks up where Toy Story 4 left things: Woody stayed on the road with Bo Peep, and Jessie, voiced by Joan Cusack, has taken over as the de facto leader of Bonnie's toys. The story splits across two tracks. Back home, Bonnie is handed a shipment of hi-tech Buzz Lightyear action figures, and separately falls for Lilypad, a kids' smart tablet voiced by Greta Lee, who is the film's real antagonist in every way that matters — she doesn't threaten anyone physically, she just offers Bonnie something more interesting than a cowboy doll, and that turns out to be much scarier for these characters than any Lotso or Gabby Gabby ever managed. Meanwhile, the new Buzz toys crash-land on a deserted island in demo mode and set off following the North Star to find their way home, in what's basically this franchise's version of a survival story.

It's a smart structural choice, because it lets the film make its argument about screens versus imagination without a single lecture. Jessie has to out-compete a tablet for a kid's attention using nothing but plastic and a voice cast that includes Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Conan O'Brien, Craig Robinson, and, in one of the year's odder trivia footnotes, an original Taylor Swift song called "I Knew It, I Knew You" written specifically for the soundtrack. I won't pretend the movie is subtle about its themes — there's a stretch in the back half that leans hard into "look up from the screen" messaging in a way that occasionally felt like it was talking past the kids in the audience and directly at their parents. But the Jessie material genuinely works, director Andrew Stanton and co-director McKenna Harris know exactly which button they're pressing and when, and I'll cop to getting properly emotional in a theater built for six-year-olds, which is either a compliment to the film or an indictment of my own Tuesday afternoon. Possibly both.

Then, three days from today, the layoffs land

Here's where the story stops being about a movie. On July 21, Disney confirmed its third round of layoffs of 2026, cutting several hundred jobs across ESPN, Disney Entertainment Television — mostly at National Geographic — and Disney's studios, where Pixar took by far the biggest hit of any division. A WARN notice filed with the state of California put the Pixar cut at 108 positions, concentrated in production, operations, editing, and technical roles; other outlets reported the number closer to 116, and Disney has never confirmed a precise figure either way. The notice states that most of those jobs end this Saturday, September 26, with further cuts scheduled through November, December, and January.

What makes the timing land so strangely is that it happened in the same week Toy Story 5 was closing in on a billion dollars worldwide, and it's the biggest round of Pixar layoffs since May 2024 — which, worth noting, is also the last time Pixar had just delivered one of its all-time biggest hits, Inside Out 2's eventual $1.69 billion. A Pixar spokesperson described this round to trade outlets as reflecting the studio's changing production needs rather than any single film's performance, and reporting from TheWrap and Fast Company suggested part of the calculation was the softer commercial run of Pixar's other 2026 release, the original film Hoppers, which made $389.5 million worldwide on a $150 million budget — a real profit under any normal math, but apparently not enough to satisfy whoever is drawing up Pixar's org chart for 2027. This was Disney's third distinct round of cuts in 2026 alone, after roughly 1,000 jobs eliminated in April across marketing, technology, and corporate teams.

Ranked, in my very debatable opinion: every Toy Story ending, by how hard it wrecked me

Nobody asked for this, but I've seen every Toy Story movie in a theater, including the original at an age where I was more or less the target demographic, and I have Opinions about which of these endings actually earns the tears versus which one is just playing the hits. This is entirely personal, it is not a critical consensus, and I will die on this hill.

1. 5

   Toy Story 2 (1999) — "When She Loved Me"

   A gorgeous, genuinely sad montage about Jessie being abandoned by her kid, but it's a flashback bolted onto a movie that otherwise ends on a fairly conventional high. Great song, lower stakes than what's coming.

2. 4

   Toy Story (1995) — "To infinity, and beyond!"

   The original ending is warm and funny rather than devastating, which is exactly right for what this movie is. It doesn't try to wreck you, so I'm not going to pretend it did.

3. 3

   Toy Story 5 (2026) — Jessie's choice

   Without spoiling it: this is the first Toy Story ending built around a toy choosing to compete rather than being chosen, and it's a smarter emotional idea than I expected from a fifth sequel. Docked a spot only because I saw the beat coming about twenty minutes early.

4. 2

   Toy Story 4 (2019) — Woody stays with Bo

   The one people are still angry about, and the one I think holds up best on a rewatch. A toy choosing his own life over his assigned purpose is a genuinely bold thing for a kids' franchise to end on, and I still think about it more than a movie about talking toys has any right to make me.

5. 1

   Toy Story 3 (2010) — Andy and the toys

   Still the one. A grown man handing off his childhood, on purpose, to a kid he's never met, because it's the right thing to do. I have never once made it through this scene with dry eyes and I never will. Nothing else on this list is close.