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'Toy Story 4': Is the new movie a good idea?

Pixar has stumbled with other sequels like 'Cars 2,' but the first three 'Toy Story' films were all huge successes, with 'Toy Story 3' earning a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Still, some fans are unhappy a new film in the series is being made.

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Disney/AP
The 'Toy Story' films feature the voices of Tom Hanks (r.), Tim Allen (center), and Joan Cusack (l.).

A fourth film in the Pixar “Toy Story” series will reportedly be released in 2017. 

According to Deadline, John Lasseter, who directed “Toy Story” and its sequel, will helm the fourth film. Lee Unkrich directed the box office smash and critically acclaimed film “Toy Story 3,” and the story for the new film was created by Lasseter, Unkrich, “WALL-E” director Andrew Stanton, and “Up” director Pete Docter, according to Deadline. 

1999's “Toy Story 2” was Pixar’s only movie sequel until the third “Toy Story” film was released in 2010 (it was soon followed by “Cars 2” and the “Monsters, Inc.” sequel “Monsters University”), and it certainly seems like “Toy Story 3” would be tough to top – the film was the highest-grossing animated movie of all time until “Frozen” took its crown last year, and it was nominated for Best Picture, still a rarity for animated movies. It currently holds an extremely positive score of 92 out of 100 on the review aggregator website Metacritic.

Still, Pixar proved long ago they shouldn’t be counted out creatively – having an elderly man as the main character, as in the film "Up," or having long nonverbal stretches of movie like in "WALL-E" were certainly gambles, yet both movies were well-received. Though sequels such as “Cars 2” and “Monsters University” didn’t win over every reviewer (“Cars 2” is the worst-reviewed Pixar film with a Metacritic score of 57, while “Monsters University” has a Metacritic score of 65), by contrast, so far the “Toy Story” franchise has been wildly successful critically – “Toy Story 2” has a score of 88 to go with the 92 score of “Toy Story 3.” 

Some fans were excited about the news and took to Twitter to express their happiness.

But others were less than happy to hear that the studio would be going back to the world of Woody and Buzz Lightyear.

Lasseter addressed these concerns in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“A lot of people in the industry view us doing sequels as being for the business of it, but for us it's pure passion," he said. "We only make sequels when we have a story that's as good as or better than the original. We don't just, because of the success of a film, automatically say we're going to do a sequel and then figure out what we're going to do.”

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