Toy Story 5's $160M Opening Resets Pixar's Box Office Trajectory

Walt Disney Co.'s Pixar delivered the biggest domestic opening of 2026 with Toy Story 5, pulling in $160 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales over the Juneteenth holiday weekend. The haul topped the $160 million forecast from Boxoffice Pro and surpassed Comcast Corp.'s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie as the year's best debut.

The opening is the strongest in the Toy Story franchise's 31-year history and Pixar's second-best ever, trailing only Incredibles 2 in 2018. Strong reviews and a Taylor Swift soundtrack single helped push the film past expectations. The long weekend, which ended on Father's Day, added to the momentum.

The result accelerates Pixar's recovery under President Jim Morris and Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter. The studio stumbled after a stretch of direct-to-Disney+ releases and box office misses, then rebounded with Inside Out 2, which became 2024's highest-grossing Hollywood film at $1.7 billion worldwide. Earlier this year, the original Pixar film Hoppers generated $388.9 million globally, a meaningful improvement over Elio's $154 million last year.

Toy Story 5 is one of three tentpoles expected to drive summer ticket sales to $4.1 billion to $4.3 billion in the U.S. and Canada, according to analysts at Rentrak and Bloomberg Intelligence. That range would match pre-pandemic levels. Sony's Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, a Universal picture, are the other two.

Disney's stock page carries an Alpha Score of 46 out of 100, labeled Mixed, reflecting the sector-wide pressure on traditional media earnings even as the studio slate improves. Comcast's stock page scores 43, also Mixed. Both face the same structural question: can theatrical hits offset the streaming cost base? For now, Toy Story 5 gives Disney a data point that says yes.