Disney's Lightyear Blasts Off With $5.2 Million in Preview Box Office

Disney's Lightyear is blasting off with $5.2 million in preview earnings at the box office. That's a great start for the family feature. To put it into perspective, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 spin dashed to $6.3 million back in April during its preview period. Analysts are projecting a $70-85 million opening weekend at the domestic box office. However, for the global take, the number sits around $135 million. Catching the blue blur could prove tricky, because Lightyear would have to prove resilient and come in above the lowest projections. Sonic 2 actually brought in $72 million during the opening frame for that film. That mark is the highest for a "family movie" in the pandemic era. (This only holds if you consider Spider-Man: No Way Home it's own category entirely.) 

Comicbook.com's Charlie Ridgely loved his time in Lightyear's world. This isn't just an extension of Toy Story. Angus MacLane and the entire creative team bring audiences a delightful vision of sci-fi past and future at the same time.

"Lightyear could absolutely work as an original title — Toy Story really isn't necessary to make the tale or characters enjoyable. But the connection is used about as perfectly as it could be," Ridgely argued. "There are a few lines that harken back to Buzz's catchphrases in Toy Story, but the story never leans on the adventures in Andy's room. Instead, it offers the chance to unpack a much more interesting version of the deeply human toy that has been in our lives for nearly 30 years. Lightyear aims for infinity and more than delivers, taking us a little further beyond what we'd expected."

Speaking with Comicbook.com, the director explained how they went about creating the "real" Buzz Lightyear for this film. It wasn't as easy as just making him the Toy Story version dropped into this world.

"Because he's a side character in Toy Story, we were going to try to figure out how to pour it into a main character, but we needed to keep a certain aesthetic, a certain sensibility to his lantern jawed squareness, but do it in a way that felt like it was motivated by something," MacLane said in an exclusive interview. "That we spent maybe more time on trying to cause otherwise. We found pretty quickly if you watch Toy Story again, you imagine a whole movie [with that Buzz], which is the guy going, 'Well, I'm going over here. Look, I'm going over there. Oh no, look, monsters!' You get tired of that pretty quickly. And so the idea, some of the revelations of how we were able to thread that needle and making it more well rounded character were essential to maintaining a feature."

Will you be seeing Lightyear this weekend? Let us know down in the comments!