Toy Story 5 director reveals Pixar paused production because the movie “wasn’t good”
Pixar put Toy Story 5 on ice when its filmmakers decided the story needed significant changes — and a director’s blunt admission explains the call.
If you thought everything at Pixar runs like a well-oiled machine, let me shatter the illusion for you. Turns out, making Toy Story 5 wasn’t all smooth sailing—far from it, in fact. The team behind Woody and Jessie’s latest misadventure actually slammed the brakes on production for a solid two weeks because, by their own admission, what they’d made simply wasn’t good enough.
Toy Story 5 landed in cinemas on 19 June 2026 and took home a tidy $1.15 billion globally.
Hit the Brakes—Hard
This rather bold bit of honesty comes straight from co-director McKenna Harris, who gave a talk at Italy’s View Conference that lifts the curtain on what really went on behind the scenes. Harris didn’t exactly pull her punches explaining the situation:
Describing the state of things, here’s how Harris told the crowd what they were up against at Pixar:
'We worked on making that movie, and we had one problem. It wasn't good.'
The original cut of Toy Story 5 had Jessie and the other toys locked into a stale rivalry with a tablet called Lilypad. Their quest, as written, was to claw back Bonnie’s attention from the shiny new tech—a case of déjà vu for anyone who’s seen literally any of the previous films. Harris herself admitted it was ‘been there, done that’. Even worse, the tension—losing out on playtime—just didn’t add up to much in terms of real stakes. It was all a bit limp, as sequels go.
Chuck it in the Bin and Start Over
Instead of ploughing ahead in the hope of a last-minute miracle, Harris and the Pixar team did something radical for a studio under a deadline: they paused. One week was spent pulling the story apart, another on writing something that might actually justify returning to these characters after four previous films. The eureka moment? Shifting the focus to Bonnie herself—less about the toys angling for attention and more about Jessie helping Bonnie deal with her own struggles, particularly around making friends. In Harris’ words, this new direction became ‘the rocket fuel’ that finally got the sequel off the ground.
Apparently, it worked. Early reactions from internal screenings were far more positive after these changes. Harris called it 'a huge improvement', and she didn’t shy away from crediting Pixar’s artists for pushing it even further with every pass—turning an okay movie into a good one, then a good one into a great one. Not your usual press release fluff, that.