Toy Story 5 pulled in $17.5 million in Thursday night previews alone. That is the highest preview number of 2026, and the second highest among all animated films ever, trailing only Incredibles 2. Let that sink in for a second. A franchise that started in 1995 just posted preview numbers that nearly every live action blockbuster would envy.
Then Friday happened. $71 million on opening day. The full weekend is tracking somewhere between $160 million and $170 million domestic, which would put it in rare territory for any film, animated or otherwise.
The numbers tell a story that goes beyond box office tracking. The audience that saw the original Toy Story in theaters in 1995 brought their kids. Those parents grew up with Woody and Buzz and now they are sharing that experience with a new generation. And that new generation showed up in force, the kind of opening day turnout that makes studios rethink what animation can actually do at the box office.
There has been a narrative in Hollywood over the past few years that animated films have a ceiling, that families wait for streaming, that the theatrical window for kids movies is shrinking. Toy Story 5 just obliterated that argument. When the material is right and the brand carries genuine emotional weight, people will leave their houses and go sit in a theater together. They were just waiting for something worth showing up for.
Pixar needed this. After a stretch where films like Lightyear underperformed and several titles got diverted straight to Disney Plus, there were real questions about whether the studio could still command a theatrical audience. Turning Red and Luca were both excellent films that never got the chance to prove themselves on the big screen. Toy Story 5 is the corrective. It is proof that the problem was never the audience losing interest in Pixar. It was the distribution strategy undermining what makes Pixar special in the first place.
The comparison to Incredibles 2 is worth dwelling on. That film opened to $182 million back in 2018 after a fourteen year gap between sequels. Toy Story 5 is arriving eleven years after the fourth installment and is threatening to land in that same neighborhood. Sequels with long gaps tend to either collapse or explode, and this one is exploding.
I do not know what the final weekend number will be by the time you read this, but it almost does not matter. The statement has already been made. Pixar can still do this. Animation can still do this. And when a studio trusts its audience enough to put the movie in theaters first, the audience will show up.
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