Tim Allen Poised To Return To ‘Toy Story’ Franchise After Disney/Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’ Lost Over $100 Million

Tim Allen just spilled the tea — or rather, the toy box — about a fifth installment to the beloved Toy Story film series, per The Wrap.

On Tuesday’s night’s episode of The Tonight Show, host Jimmy Fallon asked Allen if the rumors of a Toy Story 5 were true, to which he replied that Disney CEO Bob Iger “said it was on.”

“They have reached out to Tom [Hanks] and I to reprise the roles,” he shared. “They’re not saying anything about it.”

While the first Toy Story film debuted in 1995, the most recent film, Toy Story 4, hit theaters in June 2019.

“You wonder if four [films] was too many, is five gonna be too much,” he pondered.

However, he noted that “the writer who’s doing it wrote one of the better ones.”

“And he said, ‘If I didn’t get this right, I wouldn’t do it,'” Allen recalled. “So it could be a very, very interesting way to reunite it.”

According to Entertainment Weekly, Iger announced plans for not only a Toy Story sequel, but also sequels to Frozen and Zootopia during a quarterly earnings call in February, deeming it “a great example of how we’re leaning into our unrivaled brands and franchises.”

While Allen’s Buzz Lightyear is a Pixar staple, the iconic character was voiced by Chris Evans in a Toy Story prequel outlining the space ranger’s origin story, Lightyear, which launched into theaters in June 2022 and made just north of $50.57 million in its opening weekend, per IMDb, on its way to losing over $100 million for the studio.

Lightyear director Angus MacLane justified this choice to Vanity Fair, explaining that Evans had “the gravitas and that movie-star quality that our character needed to separate him and the movie from Tim’s version of the toy in Toy Story.”

Allen told Extra that the film had “nothing to do” with his Buzz, and claimed “a whole new team that really [had] nothing to do with the first movies” was behind it.

“And as Hanks and I — there’s really no Toy Story Buzz without Woody,” he highlighted.

Hanks, whose film Elvis hit theaters a week after Lightyear, told CinemaBlend that he “actually wanted to go head-to-head with Tim Allen and then they didn’t let Tim Allen do it.”

“I don’t understand that,” he added.

The Tonight Show airs airs on weeknights. Check the website for local listings. Watch Allen’s interview above.