‘Toy Story 5’ Is Tracking for a Record-Breaking $150M Opening That Could Make It the Biggest Film of 2026

Few animated franchises have managed to stay genuinely relevant across three decades, but Pixar’s ‘Toy Story’ series has never really stopped feeling urgent. With five films now spanning the history of modern animation, each new entry carries the weight of enormous nostalgia and equally enormous expectations, making every box office projection feel like a cultural referendum on whether audiences still care.

The fifth installment, directed by Andrew Stanton alongside co-director McKenna Harris, shifts the emotional center of the story to Jessie and takes on perhaps the most relatable conflict in the franchise’s history, exploring what happens to beloved toys when a screen becomes the favorite thing in the room. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and Joan Cusack all reprise their roles as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and Jessie, with Greta Lee joining as Lilypad and Conan O’Brien and Ernie Hudson rounding out the new additions to the cast.

According to Deadline, early tracking numbers are now pointing toward a massive $150 million domestic debut, making Disney and Pixar’s newest animated sequel one of the biggest theatrical events of 2026 before it even hits theaters. The Box Office flagged the updated range at $150 to $175 million, and that upper ceiling would put the film firmly in rarefied company. Tickets went on sale recently for the June 19 release, and three-week tracking currently sits at $150 million, which if it holds would mark a record opening for the franchise.

The previous franchise record belongs to ‘Toy Story 4’, which opened to $120.9 million at the domestic box office back in 2019 before becoming a billion-dollar global hit. A $150 million opening would currently rank as the biggest domestic debut of 2026, surpassing the impressive launch of ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’, which opened to $131.7 million earlier this year.

Current tracking shows strong first-choice numbers across all four audience quadrants, with particularly impressive interest among women and men under 25, and overall first-choice metrics are running ahead of ‘Toy Story 4’ across the board. Interestingly, current first-choice audience interest for ‘Toy Story 5’ is reportedly tracking ahead of ‘Inside Out 2’ at the same point in the release cycle, the film that debuted to $154.2 million and ultimately became one of Pixar’s highest-grossing films ever.

The biggest opening ever for an animated movie at the domestic box office belongs to ‘The Incredibles 2’ with $182.6 million, a benchmark that a very strong overperformance could theoretically threaten. Analytics site BoxOfficeTheory has noted that Pixar has yet to miss with a direct sequel in the ‘Toy Story’ line, with nearly $2.9 billion in global box office across four entries since 1995, a track record that helps explain why confidence in the fifth installment is running so high.

The thematic ambition behind the film may be part of what is driving that confidence among audiences. Speaking to Empire, director Andrew Stanton described the film’s approach as confronting something unavoidable rather than dramatizing a simple battle, saying it is “not even really about a battle so much as the realization of an existential problem: that nobody’s really playing with toys anymore,” adding that “technology has changed everybody’s lives, but we’re asking what that means for us and to our kids.” The film directly tackles the rise of children playing with technology over toys, a theme that Pixar believed was a story genuinely worth telling.

Whether those early projections survive contact with opening weekend remains to be seen, but the anticipation surrounding ‘Toy Story 5’ feels different from typical sequel hype, closer to the kind of event moviegoing that only a small number of films generate each year. If Woody, Buzz, and Jessie do hit the top of the 2026 box office chart, it would be one of the most remarkable franchise comebacks the animation world has seen in years, so the question worth asking is: does Pixar’s heartfelt bet on the toys-versus-tech story resonate with you enough to actually pull you back to the cinema?