Disney Announces TOY STORY 4 For June 2017

Disney is having a busy day today. First they had Lucasfilm announce the title for the upcoming seventh Star Wars film. And then they followed that up by mentioning in their quarterly earnings call this afternoon that their Pixar division is in the midst of working on a fourth Toy Story film for release in June 2017.

The first Toy Story film solidified Pixar’s reputation as the premier computer-generated animation studio whose output, though somewhat shakey in the last several years, has remained in general unrivaled nearly two decades later.

John Lasseter, who directed the first two Toy Story films, is back at the helm of this fourth installment with the Celeste And Jesse Forever writing team of Rashida Jones and Will McCormack handling the script chores.

Over on the Official Disney Fan Club website, Lasseter stated –

We love these characters so much; they are like family to us. We don’t want to do anything with them unless it lives up to or surpasses what’s gone before. Toy Story 3 ended Woody and Buzz’s story with Andy so perfectly that for a long time, we never even talked about doing another Toy Story movie. But when [Pixar creative braintrust] Andrew [Stanton], Pete [Docter], and Lee [Unkrich], and I came up with this new idea, I just could not stop thinking about it. It was so exciting to me, I knew we had to make this movie—and I wanted to direct it myself.

Outside of the Toy Story films, Pixar has not had much critical luck with their sequels. And even some of their recent films have not scored as well. (I’m looking at you Brave.) And even though Toy Story 3 did provide a good capstone to the story of Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest, with Lasseter at the helm, I don’t think there is any chance that this won’t disappoint.