You can stop pretending to hate Toy Story 5 now

The numbers are in, and they are grimly hilarious. Toy Story 5 is currently coasting past the $300 million mark at the U.S. box office. This is the exact same film that, for the better part of two years, the internet collectively agreed was a cynical, unnecessary cash grab. We mourned the death of original cinema. We tweeted our exhaustion at the endless conveyor belt of IP. And then, the very second opening weekend arrived, we all lined up and bought tickets anyway.

Look at the wreckage it’s leaving in its wake. Supergirl is currently sputtering to a miserable $40 million opening, effectively dead on arrival while audiences flock back to the comfort blanket of Woody and Buzz. You simply cannot claim to want bold, new cinematic swings while actively rewarding a studio for resurrecting a franchise that has already had two perfectly conclusive, emotionally devastating endings. We are voting with our wallets, and we are overwhelmingly voting for the infinite loop.

So let’s drop the performative outrage. Disney and Pixar are not the villains here; they are simply running a highly efficient catering business. Why on earth would they risk a massive budget on an untested concept when they know you will happily pay to watch a pull-string cowboy have an existential crisis for the fifth time? They did not bankrupt modern cinema. We did, by consistently proving we’re terrified of spending two hours with characters we don’t already know.

It barely even matters if Toy Story 5 is actually good. It could be two hours of Mr. Potato Head doing his tax returns and it would still clear half a billion dollars globally. The franchise is no longer a film series; it’s a generational tax. We pay it out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia, dragging our kids into the cinema to validate our own childhoods, entirely ignoring that the story wrapped up neatly over a decade ago.

We get the multiplex we deserve. If you actually want a landscape of risky, original filmmaking, you have to buy tickets to those films when they arrive. But until that happens, you forfeit the right to complain about the sequel machine. Expect Toy Story 6 to be greenlit by Christmas. We practically begged for it.