Streaming viewership According to
Whip Media,
Lightyear was the 2nd most watched movie in the United States across all platforms, during the weekend of August 5, 2022, to August 7, 2022. According to the streaming aggregator Reelgood,
Lightyear was the 10th most watched program across all platforms, during the week of August 12, 2022. According to
Nielsen Holdings,
Lightyear was the 9th most streamed movie across all platforms, during the week of August 29, 2022, to September 4, 2022.
Lightyear was the most watched movie worldwide on Disney+ in August 2022. It was on the number one spot on the platform for 35 days consecutively.
Box office Lightyear grossed $118.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $108.1 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $226.4 million. It was the fourth highest-grossing animated film of 2022 in the U.S. and the fifth worldwide.
Deadline Hollywood calculated the film lost the studio $106million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues. In the United States and Canada,
Lightyear was projected to gross $70–85 million from 4,255 theaters in its opening weekend, with some estimates reaching as high as $105 million. However, after making $20.7 million on its first day (including $5.2 million from Thursday night previews), estimates were lowered to $51–55 million. It went on to debut to $50.6 million, finishing second behind holdover
Jurassic World Dominion. Additionally, the film earned $34.6 million from 43 international markets, bringing its worldwide three-day debut to $85.2 million. In its second weekend,
Lightyear declined 64.1% to $18.2 million, the second-lowest sophomore drop for a Pixar film after
Onward (73%), which opened at the onset of the pandemic. Both
Deadline Hollywood and
Variety attributed the performance to competition from
Jurassic World Dominion and
Top Gun: Maverick, though ultimately noted it as a disappointment given the brand strength of both Pixar and the
Toy Story franchise.
Los Angeles Times writer Ryan Faughnder believed that the film was at a disadvantage, since, as a spin-off film, it did not have well-known
Toy Story characters such as
Woody. He also noted that spin-offs tend to not gross as much as the main franchise installments, and compared the film to the spin-off films
Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) and
Hobbs & Shaw (2019). Pamela McClintock of
The Hollywood Reporter wrote that, in addition to competition from
Jurassic World Dominion and
Top Gun: Maverick, the lackluster opening was attributed to brand confusion in the film's marketing. McClintock, Martha Ross of
The Mercury News, and
The Washington Posts Sonny Bunch also questioned if the response from people over the inclusion of a
lesbian couple kissing and the decision not to cast
Tim Allen in the role of Buzz Lightyear were the reasons for the film's low opening. Other box office analysts believed family audiences might have not shown up to theaters after becoming accustomed to the availability of Pixar films at home after their three previous films,
Soul (2020),
Luca (2021), and
Turning Red (2022), were released directly to
Disney+ during the pandemic. Some box office analysts theorized that family audiences were reluctant to attend theaters in general due to COVID-19 concerns, although this was disproven after
Minions: The Rise of Gru opened to $107 million in the U.S. and Canada two weeks later.
Critical response It is the lowest rated film of the
Toy Story franchise on Rotten Tomatoes. David Rooney of
The Hollywood Reporter called it "a funny spinoff with suspense and heart, a captivatingly spirited toon take on splashy live-action retro popcorn entertainment." Emma Stefansky of
Thrillist said: "There's plenty in
Lightyear to enjoy, and it's one of Pixar's better efforts over the last 10 years, but it ultimately feels half-done. It feels like it ought to be the beginning of something, like its narrative is a prologue stretched into a feature awaiting the much more interesting second and third and fifth installments down the road."
RogerEbert.com-based critic Odie Henderson praised the score who called it as "one of Giacchino's best scores" and "a delectable spoof of bombastic space movie music that elevates every scene it plays under". Tara Brady of
The Irish Times wrote: "There are some striking designs and a few hat-tips to
2001: A Space Odyssey. But it all feels a bit perfunctory, like a successful launch that has no destination among the stars or anywhere else." Valerie Complex of
Deadline Hollywood stated: "
Lightyear does not rely too much on
Toy Story lore to build its world, but it would have benefited from showing some connection to that part of the franchise instead of using title cards." She further praised the technical aspects, and wrote: "The animation is gorgeous and hyper-realistic. The art department put their all into designing this universe and its characters and robotic villains," but criticized the screenplay saying "sometimes the story becomes convoluted and drags on, almost like there was a need to pad the runtime, causing
Lightyear to get into even more trouble and creating a never-ending slew of trampling obstacles."
Variety's
Owen Gleiberman wrote: "
Lightyear in its eminently conventional and likable way, is a far less audacious movie than that. For what is surely not the first time,
Buzz's I-can-do-anything myopic bravado has failed [...] part of that may be that in the
Toy Story films, he
is a toy — that's part of the joke, one that Buzz is never quite in on. He thinks he's a real Space Ranger! So when you actually turn Buzz Lightyear into a Space Ranger, you enlarge him and diminish him at the same time." In contrast,
BBC's Nicholas Barber wrote: "The story is thin, repetitive, and almost entirely dependent on the heroes being clumsy" and gave the film two stars. David Ehrlich of
IndieWire wrote: "
Lightyear remains firmly stuck in the past even as it hurtles toward the future. And while screenwriters Jason Headley and
Angus MacLane need that push-pull in order to tell a story about reconciling the lure of nostalgia with the potential for something new, it's hard for a movie to sell us on living in the moment when every scene feels like it's settling for less." Kaleem Aftab of
Time Out called the film "a franchise low, Pixar's meta
Toy Story spin-off gets lost in space." The film has received criticism from some conservatives, who have argued that the film's scene with a same-sex kiss is inappropriate for children, saying that
Disney sexualizes them. When asked about
Lightyear in 2023, Pixar's chief creative officer
Pete Docter stated that while the studio "love[s] the movie", he believed "we asked too much of the audience. [...] 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. [...] 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."
Accolades ==Impact==