Toy Story 5 Crosses $1 Billion, Tops the 2026 Box Office

Thirty years after a cowboy doll and a space ranger first argued over who owned a kid's bedroom, they are still cleaning up at the box office. Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5 has crossed $1 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2026 so far and the third entry in the series to reach ten figures. Woody has now outlasted an entire generation of moviegoers, and he is still selling tickets faster than almost anything else in theaters.

The milestone landed over the July 24-26 frame, with the global total sitting at roughly $1.022 billion, split between about $448.6 million domestic and $573.5 million overseas, according to figures tracked by The Numbers. That was enough to slide the film past Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, both parked just above $1.01 billion, and claim the year's crown outright. Pixar and Disney built the run on a reported $250 million production budget, and it took six weekends in release to get there, as Variety noted when the number officially tipped over.

It is only the sixth Pixar feature ever to reach a billion dollars, and half of those are Toy Story movies. That concentration tells you something. When Pixar reaches for a sure thing in 2026, it reaches for the same box of toys it opened in 1995.

Why It Matters

A billion-dollar animated sequel is not a shock on its own. What makes this one worth a closer look is the pace of the year around it. Toy Story 5 is the third film to clear the billion-dollar bar in 2026, and it is only late July.

For context on how rare that rhythm has become: nine movies hit the mark back in 2019, then the pandemic wiped the slate clean with zero in 2020. The climb back has been slow and uneven, one film in 2021, a scattered few in the years since, and four in all of last year. Reaching three before August, with more contenders lining up behind it, is the healthiest the theatrical calendar has looked in years. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is already chasing the fourth slot, and a summer that produces four or five billion-dollar releases would be the strongest count since before the shutdown.

The through-line is simple: audiences will still leave the house in enormous numbers when the movie feels like an event. Streaming did not kill that instinct. It just raised the bar for what clears it.

The Reaction

The numbers did not sneak up on anyone. Toy Story 5 opened to $159.7 million domestically in June, the biggest debut of the year at the time and a franchise opening record, then refused to fall off. It held its audience through the summer on a 93% Rotten Tomatoes score and a coveted A CinemaScore, the kind of word-of-mouth combination that turns a big opening into a long tail.

Part of the staying power came from a soundtrack play no rival could match. Taylor Swift's original song for the film, "I Knew It, I Knew You," hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 in June, handing the movie a marketing engine that ran on its own for weeks. Families who had aged out of the franchise found a reason to circle back, and the kids who had never met Woody had a reason to show up in the first place.

Reviewers largely agreed the film earned its reception rather than coasting on nostalgia, praising a story that took a real swing at something instead of simply reuniting familiar voices.

What Comes Next

The next milestone is a family matter. Toy Story 5 already owns the series domestic record, but its worldwide haul still trails Toy Story 3 at $1.067 billion and Toy Story 4 at $1.073 billion. At its current weekly pace, both of those marks are within reach, which would make the fifth film the biggest Toy Story of them all, three decades into the experiment.

The competitive picture shifts this week, too. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens July 31 with domestic projections starting around $180 million, which will take the weekend crown and pull some screens away. Nolan's The Odyssey, meanwhile, is chasing the year's overall gross with $639.6 million banked in just ten days, as TheWrap laid out in its rundown of the 2026 billion-dollar club. The race for the top of the annual chart is genuinely open.

For Pixar, the immediate question is whether the toys can pass their own past selves before the box office momentum cools. Given how the summer has gone, betting against them looks unwise.

Closing Thoughts

What is striking about Toy Story 5 is not that it made a billion dollars. It is what the movie chose to be about. Directed and written by Andrew Stanton alongside co-director Kenna Harris, the film sends Buzz Lightyear, Woody, and Jessie into competition with Lilypad, a frog-faced smart tablet that has stolen their kid's attention. A toy franchise built in the earliest days of computer animation, litigating screen time in a living room, is Pixar quietly arguing for its own reason to exist.

That directness is probably why parents responded the way they did. The anxiety at the center of the film is the same one sitting on every coffee table, and watching a plastic cowboy make the case for putting the screen down lands differently when you are holding a phone in the dark of the theater. Thirty years on, the franchise that a 1995 render farm supposedly made obsolete is still finding new things to say about the very technology that created it.

Woody has been on the clock since 1995. He is older than plenty of the parents now buying tickets, and he is still, somehow, the surest bet in the building.

한글 요약

디즈니·픽사의 토이 스토리 5가 전 세계 흥행 10억 달러를 돌파하며 2026년 최고 흥행작에 올랐습니다. 7월 24~26일 주말 기준 글로벌 누적 약 10억 2,200만 달러(북미 약 4억 4,860만·해외 약 5억 7,350만)로, 마이클과 슈퍼 마리오 갤럭시 무비를 제치고 올해 1위를 차지했습니다. 제작비는 약 2억 5,000만 달러, 개봉 6주 만에 달성한 기록이며 시리즈로는 세 번째, 픽사 작품으로는 여섯 번째 10억 달러 영화입니다.

흥행 배경에는 6월 북미 개봉 첫 주 1억 5,970만 달러(연중 최대·프랜차이째 오프닝 다이비), 로튼토마토 93%·시네마스코어 A라는 탄탄한 입소문, 그리고 6월 빌보드 핫100 1위에 오른 테일러 스위프트의 주제가 "I Knew It, I Knew You"가 있었습니다. 앤드루 스타튼이 케나 해리스 공동연출과 함께 만든 이번 편은 스마트 태블릿 '릴리패드'에게 아이의 관심을 빼앗긴 버즈·우디·제시의 이야기로, 스크린 타임이라는 현대 가정의 불안을 정면으로 다뤄 부모 관객의 공감을 얻었습니다.

남은 관전 포인트는 시리즈 내부 기록입니다. 북미 기록은 이미 경신했지만 월드와이드로는 토이 스토리 3(10억 6,700만)와 토이 스토리 4(10억 7,300만)를 아직 넘지 못했고, 현재 속도라면 두 기록 모두 곧 돌파가 예상됩니다. 7월 31일 스파이더맨: 브랜드 뉴 데이 개봉과 놀란의 오디세이(10일 만에 6억 3,960만) 상승세 속에서 2026년 연간 1위 경쟁도 본격화되고 있습니다. 참고: Variety, Deadline, TheWrap.