Buzz Lightyear will be returning to the big screen in the near future, but it won’t be the toy incarnation who’s been voiced by Tim Allen in the Toy Story film series. Instead, Lightyear will depict the origin story of the character who inspired the toy, with Chris Evans voicing the title protagonist. The first trailer for the upcoming Pixar movie dropped this past Wednesday, and it’s broken some major records.
According to Deadline, the Lightyear teaser trailer collected 83 million views during its first 24 hours of availability. Not only did this outpace the first teasers for fellow Pixar movies Toy Story 4 (62 million), Soul (32 million) and Luca (28 million) during that same span of time, it also surpassed the first trailers for Marvel’s Eternals and the Emma Stone-led Cruella, which pulled in 77 million and 71 million, respectively. Lightyear now has the second most successful first day Pixar trailer launch, with Incredibles 2 still holding the top spot at 114 million.
Additionally, Lightyear quickly climbed to the top of Twitter’s top global trends on the day the trailer premiered, and Chris Evans, Toy Story and “To Infinity and Beyond” (the character’s catchphrase) also started trending. The Lightyear teaser also became the #1 trending story on Reddit and was YouTube’s top global video in the “Overall” and “Movies” categories. In summary, there’s a lot of interest in this next Pixar movie, and I’m curious to see how the next Lightyear trailer performs. After all, with the spinoff not arriving until next summer, you can be sure Disney will release another preview that provides more details about the plot.
Lightyear was officially announced in December 2020 at Disney’s investor presentation, although development on the spinoff stretches back to after Finding Dory was completed. Speaking of which, Angus MacLane, who directed that 2016 Pixar movie, is helming Lightyear, while Peter Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer, wrote the script. So far Chris Evans is the only actor who’s been revealed for the spinoff, and according to MacLane, the Captain America star was the first choice to play this version of Buzz Lightyear. Delving into Buzz Lightyear’s time as a Space Ranger was previously done in the animated series Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, which featured Patrick Warburton voicing the character.
On the off chance you’ve read this far and still haven’t watched the first Lightyear trailer yet, feel free to do so below.
Lightyear is set to hit theaters on June 17, 2022, so keep checking back with CinemaBlend for more news about the spinoff. You’re also welcome to browse through our 2022 release schedule to learn what other movies come out next year, or head over to Disney+ to re-watch the Toy Story movies and the numerous shorts tied to the franchise.
