This weekend, Disney's Pixar's newest movie, in which Chris Evans voices Buzz Lightyear, opened to an estimated $51 million at North American theaters.
The movie business thought it would make around $70 million, which was a lot less than that number. Disney says that the movie made $85.6 million around the world (DIS).
The movie also didn't open at number one at the box office. Instead, it opened at number two, behind Jurassic World: Dominion, which made an estimated $58.6 million in its second weekend.
The opening is a bad start for one of the most successful and well-known studios in Hollywood, Pixar. The animation studio has made hits like Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo, which have brought in $14.7 billion around the world.
To give you an idea of how Lightyear did compared to other Pixar movies, it opened near the end of the studio's list of films. Comscore says that the $51 million opening puts it behind Cars 3, which came out in 2017.
So why didn't Lightyear become more popular?
The movie is based on the characters from the popular Toy Story series, and Rotten Tomatoes gave it a score of 77 percent, which is good but not great. But many things could have kept people from coming.
First of all, it might have been hard for people to understand what the movie was about. It's not quite a Toy Story movie because Lightyear was marketed as a movie about the man behind the toy, not the toy itself. In the end, families might have been confused about the movie, which might have kept them from going.
This is also the first new Pixar movie to come out since 2020. The last three movies made by the studio—Soul, Luca, and Turning Red—went straight to Disney+. The decision to put those movies on streaming may have made people stay home and wait for Lightyear to come out on Disney+ instead of going to the theater.
Overall, Lightyear might still find an audience in the next couple of weeks, since there aren't many family-friendly movies out right now. Minions: The Rise of Gru, from Universal and Illumination Entertainment, will be the next big family movie.
Top Gun: Maverick still does well at the box office, among other movies. The Tom Cruise movie from Paramount, which was in its fourth weekend, came in third place with $44 million. That's only a 15% drop from the week before.
So far, the movie has made $885 million around the world. In it, Tom Cruise plays Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, the role he played in Top Gun in 1986.
