Disney and Pixar have developed the frustrating habit of crafting sequels, remakes, and spin-offs that nobody seems to be asking for, an issue that arguably hasn’t summed been summed up any better – or worse – than the fate to befall Lightyear.
Toy Story 3 ended a near-perfect trilogy on the best possible note, only for the Mouse House to decide that another billion-dollar hit was too good to pass up. Mercifully, the fourth installment justified its existence, but the canonically confusing offshoot headlined by Chris Evans as the title hero certainly did not.
Opening with a disclaimer that throws up Inception-level questions when the film is set in a world where Buzz Lightyear is real, an animated epic set in a fictional universe nestled inside of an already fictional universe causing mass confusion was the least of its worries when the box office numbers came in.
In spite of a stellar 74 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, the $200 million intergalactic adventure barely recouped its budget at the box office, and ended up as one of last year’s heftiest flops once the numbers had been crunched and it was estimated to have lost almost $110 million for the Mouse House.
That’s without even mentioning the inevitable controversy surrounding the same-sex kiss that saw it banned in several nations and ruffled a lot of feathers for obvious reasons, either, but is Lightyear better than its reputation suggests? That’s the debate currently unfolding on Reddit, but everyone at least seems to be in unanimous agreement that the space opera’s biggest and most notable flaw was that it never needed to exist in the first place, which may well have doomed it from the start.