Why did it bomb in theaters? Because the trailers didn’t make this movie look exciting. The only thing the trailers did was just say, “hey, you know that character Buzz Lightyear that you love? Well, he’s back… kind of!”

I don’t think anybody had any idea what the movie was actually about going into it. And if you were to remove the name lightyear from the story, and just make it “John Smith, the space guy” it would lose all interest from audiences.

And of course there was the whole “woke” thing. Personally I think it’s awesome that Pixar is incorporating diversity in their films, but at the end of the day, there’s going to be a large (stupid) portion of the population who protests any movie that does that. So of course that will hurt box office numbers.

But the real question is: why were the trailers bad? Because, well, the movie wasn’t all that great. It had it’s cool moments, but honestly, it was one of Pixar’s worse movies in my opinion.

I know they were trying to reinvent the character of Buzz… and like, yeah, they succeeded in doing so…. But I don’t think anybody liked this Buzz as much as the one we knew. I don’t know about you, but when I watch a Buzz Lightyear movie, I want a action packed epic thrill ride. This movie had its moments of action, but somehow it just didn’t deliver.

It also felt like it was taking on a bit too much. They had the whole idea of a colony being stranded on a planet, and flourishing into a society. They did the whole Interstellar take on relativity and time travel. Then they had the whole alien attack thing. Then there was the twist that Zurg is actually future Buzz. It just felt like too much. Granted, I think if you took any group of writers in the world, sat them down in a room, and told them, “you have to make a script that incorporates all of these elements”, no group is going to be better than Pixar. But it raises the question, do all of these concepts need to be packed into one script?

It also seems silly that Toy Story Buzz is based off of Lightyear Buzz, but they feel like entirely different characters. It also doesn’t make sense that Toy Zurg believes Buzz is his son, even though Lightyear establishes that isn’t the case. Why would the Toys believe something like that when it’s not in the movie they’re based on? It just doesn’t make sense.

The only thing this movie had going for it was the fact that it was based on the name Buzz Lightyear. And ironically, if the writers had just given us a character that was closer to the Buzz we know and love, audiences would’ve ate that up.

But since they gave us a new Buzz, they couldn’t even deliver on the one catch the movie had going for it: that we’d get to see the Buzz we know and love.