Lightyear Skyrockets to Number One Movie on Streaming Charts

It should come as no surprise that Lightyear had a massive streaming debut for Disney+. The new Pixar movie, a Toy Story-adjacent film that shows the sci-fi blockbuster Andy watched in 1995, wasn’t the biggest hit when it was released in theaters this summer. But new Pixar titles have been great performers for Disney+, and Lightyear is no exception. Lightyear was the biggest movie in all of streaming the week it was released.

Nielsen recently published the data from the top streaming titles from the week of August 1st through August 7th. During that span, Lightyear was viewed for more than 1.3 billion minutes, beating out every other movie available on major streaming services. Uncharted came in second, racking up just over one billion minutes after being added to Netflix.

Perhaps even more impressive is the fact that Lightyear was the third most watched title on streaming that week, beating out most TV shows as well. Only Stranger Things and Virgin River racked up more minutes during that span.

Tim Allen voiced the toy version of Buzz Lightyear for decades, appearing in all four Toy Story films. Lightyear saw Chris Evans take on the role instead. The filmmakers behind Pixar’s latest thought the “real” version of the character needed to sound a little different. 

“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,” Lightyear director Angus MacLane told ComicBook.com 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.”

Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear is now streaming on Disney+.