24 Feb – Pixar recently admitted that they are now learning a lesson following the failure of "Lightyear" at the box office. The studio, which rarely did it wrong when it comes to their movies, found itself suffering from a huge loss with the animated feature, which only made USD 226.4 million at the box office despite being made with a budget of USD 200 million. "We've done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie. We love the characters and the premise," said CCO Peter Docter in a recent interview with The Wrap. "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?' And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they're like, 'What?'"
He continued, "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... it was much more of a science fiction. And [director] Angus [MacLane], to his credit, took it very seriously and genuinely and wanted to represent those characters as real characters. 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." It is noted that the movie was banned in a majority of Muslim countries as well as China over its same-sex kiss scene, after Disney refused to make the cuts as requested. Many fans were also frustrated over the decision to cast Chris Evans as Buzz instead of having the original, Tim Allen to reprise the role.