Pete Docter Believes Audiences “Didn’t Get” Lightyear

The 2022 sci-fi adventure film Lightyear is perhaps one of Pixar’s biggest theatrical blunders of the company’s history. What seemed like an easy payday with the character of Buzz Lightyear getting his own film people should have been excited right?



However the $200 Million film only made $226 Million and revived a mixed reaction from both audiences and critics. The Buzz from this film did not feel like the Buzz from Toy Story. Saying that this was the film that made Andy want a Buzz Lightyear toy feels like a bit of a stretch.



Despite the mixed reaction, Pixar head Pete Docter had a few things to say about the film when he recently spoke with The Wrap. He stated:

“We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie. We love the characters and the premise. 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? 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.“

The main issue with this talking point on saying that audiences ‘didn’t get it’ due to it not being in the Toy Story universe, is that we already has a Buzz Lightyear movie from 2000 that was direct-to-video tie-in for the popular Buzz Lightyear of Star Command cartoon series.



The reason why the film failed was due to how divorced it felt from the character itself. Lightyear felt as faithful to Buzz Lightyear as Michael Bay’s Transformers were as faithful to the G1 Transformers. And when John Lasseter, the creator of the character, apparently calls out the movie you know it wasn’t simply the audiences’ fault it failed.

Source: AV Club