Disney had a rough year in 2022. First, the company needlessly inserted itself into the debate over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law and brought itself all sorts of bad press, and then some Disney producers’ “not-so-secret gay agenda” became really not-so-secret. Stocks took a nosedive, and Disney’s image took on some tarnish.
Then came what was supposed to be the summer’s big animated blockbuster, Pixar’s Lightyear. The origin story of Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story franchise courted controversy from the get-go. First, the movie wouldn’t feature Tim Allen voicing the titular character. For this film, Pixar replaced him with Chris Evans. The explanation was simple enough: the movie was about the human inspiration for the toy character. Fair enough.
Then there was the matter of the lesbian kiss in the movie. That scene stirred up the most controversy and bad press for Pixar. Parents didn’t want to subject their young kids to lesbian scenes, so families stayed away. As a result, Lightyear bombed at the box office. The $200 million cartoon only brought in $51 million over its opening weekend — and studios expect a big debut for big-budget movies.
Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter, also an animator, writer, director, and producer for the studio, reflected on Lightyear‘s failure in an interview with The Wrap and posited his own reasons for the movie’s lackluster performance.
“We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie,” he said. “We love the characters and the premise. I think probably what we’ve ended on in terms of what went wrong is that we asked too much of the audience.”
“When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr. Potato Head and Woody and Rex?” he continued. “And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, What?”
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Lightyear might have been a jarring treatment of a beloved character that moviegoers didn’t expect. In Docter’s eyes, the studio didn’t do a good enough job of preparing audiences for what they would get.
“Even if they’ve read the material in press, it was just a little too distant, both in concept, and I think in the way that characters were drawn, that they were portrayed,” he added. “It was much more of a science fiction… But the characters in ‘Toy Story’ are much broader, and so I think there was a disconnect between what people wanted/expected and what we were giving to them.”
Docter knows what he’s talking about. He has ushered the animation studio through the transition after longtime studio head John Lasseter was forced out over sexual misconduct allegations. Docter is also the only person who has won three Oscars in the Best Animated Feature category as well. So he may have a point — to a certain extent.
But to fail to mention the controversy that Lightyear courted? Docter had to be aware of it all, and he had to know that it played a role in the film’s failure. He could be making excuses, or maybe he’s just overlooking the obvious.
Docter may well be avoiding the controversy altogether. He’s a committed Christian, although his views on the whole LGBTQ (and sometimes Y) movement aren’t clear, so he might have avoided the lesbian kiss in the interview as a way of steering clear of hot-button issues.
Regardless of the other reasons that Lightyear failed to blast into the box-office stratosphere, the lesbian controversy had to play a role, and it’s hard to grasp why the head of the studio didn’t acknowledge it.
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