‘Lightyear’ Opening Weekend Box Office Falls Below Projections at $51 Million

Katie Francis

‘Lightyear’ Opening Weekend Box Office Falls Below Projections at $51 Million

Disney and Pixar’s “Lightyear,” a film centering around the astronaut that inspired the Buzz Lightyear toy from the “Toy Story” franchise, fell below projections for its opening weekend box office. The animated movie net approximately $51 million whereas pre-release projections were expecting $70 million.

The previous three Pixar releases went straight to Disney+, marking this as the first return since “Onward” in 2020. The most recent release from Disney Animation, “Encanto,” opened to only $27 million.

“Lightyear” now holds the title for best domestic opening for an animated feature film since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

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14 thoughts on “‘Lightyear’ Opening Weekend Box Office Falls Below Projections at $51 Million”

  1. Movies are currently over $25 a ticket, there isn’t a surprise that family movies are opening to far lower crowds then pre-pandemic.

      • Buzz fell $20 million below expectations and only a little ahead of Top Gun (in its 4th week). That’s a disappointment. Encanto wasn’t released in remotely the same circumstances.

      • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 earned over $71 its opening weekend. Way\, way more than Lightyear’s weak opening. People are tired of all this woke signally.

    • Has nothing to do with being “woke”, whatever that word means to you. It’s most likely a combination of a story fewer people are interested in, combined with going against Jurassic World 3.

      • It has everything to do with woke. Perhaps you should speak to people on the other side of the fence before drawing naive conclusions.

        PS: WDWNT, shame on you for not approving all comments…

        • We have a certain number of employees here who focus on bringing you news, at no charge to you of course, so we get to moderating comments when we can. If you would like to voice an opinion when something happens immediately, I would use social media. We sadly have to moderate this as people write very harmful and derogatory things about others on our website.

    • This. 100%. People want to have a break from reality and not be preached at. Which is why top gun is killing it at the box office-great story, clear good guy/bad guy delineation, and no political preaching. Just a good story.

      • Um, what political preaching? Did you actually see Lightyear? Because it doesn’t sound like you did.

  2. I will admit, I don’t really know what “woke” means but I hope I can provide some insight into the movie I saw this weekend.

    It was a fine little sci-fi movie, detailing the story of Capt. Buzz Lightyear getting a large crew of space explorers marooned on an uncharted world and offering himself to help test experimental crafts and fuel to get the stranded crew off the planet. This in tern playing into the theory of time dilation in which poor Buzz keeps getting thrown years ahead in time with each test while the crew has to survive on the hostile world.
    Like I said it’s a nice story with some fun moments interesting sci-fi and Sox definitely steals the show. (He’s the best!)
    When it came to politics, I never saw any. It was actually a strange complaint I had. I couldn’t tell what this crews mission actually was. They are either on their way home or exploring space. I couldn’t really tell. They never mentioned their government coming to look for them or even how exactly things were run, it was very vague. I would have liked to know more of what exactly was going on in this universe and why exactly the Space Ranger Corp was put into place.
    As for the complaint I hear the most. I’m aware of how much hate homosexuals get, the idea of same sex relationships upset a lot of people. I know it can be a touchy thing, but in this movie it never was brought to the forefront of the movie. Let me try and explain without spoilers and show you what I mean.
    Buzz and his best friend Al are Space Rangers in charge of aspaceship with a crew of 1200. The ship crashes on an unknown world and they put together a plan to fix the ship and get everyone home. Buzz does the flight testing and Al stays behind to run the test program. Buzz keeps coming home to find Al has aged. He moves forward in time after a tes flight. He finds Al has gotten married and has a granddaughter. Buzz works with the granddaughter now to get everyone home, yadda yadda space stuff. Movie ends. This was all shown in the trailers. Now take Al and make him Alisha and that’s all that changes. Nothing about the character changes at all, really! It’s just Pixar writing this story, but instead of Buzz’s best friend being a guy, it’s a girl. Ever other beat stays the same.
    All in all it was a nice sci-fi movie. Not the greatest, but certainly something I enjoyed watching. (Especially for Sox)

    Give it a shot. It won’t hurt. I promise.

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