Toy Story 5 (2026 film)

Cast indisposition at the show I was meant to be seeing had me at a loose end for an evening. While my default modus operandi would be to head home and catch up on life admin and emails and other things, the heatwave left me too zonked to be bothered with all that. So I booked into a cinema which I knew to be airconditioned. Of course, Totally Fucking London (TfL) had to delay me so substantially that I ended up walking the distance of a couple of Tube stops and ended up slightly late to my screening. Even allowing for the trailers!

My previous experiences at Curzon recently have been a full thirty minutes of them. Someone somewhere had obviously complained about that, because I thought I had enough time to use the conveniences (following the advice to drink at least two litres of water a day is not without consequences, even in a heatwave) and get myself a glass of wine. The staff were not exactly hurrying me in. So I took my sweet time. But as soon as I went in and sat down, I realised Toy Story 5 (only God can judge me) was already underway. I’d missed the British Board of Film Classification health warning thingy.

As I found out from other patrons afterwards, who were very sympathetic to my District Line travel woes, I hadn’t missed very much at all – and nothing in terms of storyline. One lady thought I'd arrived at just the right time. It didn't feel like it, but it is one of the most expensive animated motion pictures ever made, costing about as much as 2019’s The Lion King and about $10 million less than 2010’s Tangled. Blowing $250 million on a film that spends much of its time bemoaning the apparent overuse of ‘devices’ by children today, to the detriment of time and energy spent on physical toys, seemed to me a gross overspend.

Without giving too much away (which in this case, I think, is quite impossible, but here goes anyway), if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. When “Lilypad”, a tablet device, is given to Bonnie, a shy schoolgirl who was the last pupil in her class to ditch her toys in favour of being entertained by a tablet, there are benefits as well as drawbacks. She is welcomed by her classmates, and is even invited over for a ‘sleepover’, which is not something that ever occurred before. But the film is keen to show the dark side of social media too, and there’s an instance of online bullying that is frankly relatable to adults as well as children.

Despite the inclusion of a Taylor Swift number, ‘I Knew It, I Knew You’, there are iterations of ‘When She Loved Me’ from Toy Story 2 that make their appearance here, and it’s the latter tune that stays in my head the morning after the night before. It was quite odd, in a way, watching a Toy Story movie at an 8:30pm screening, an adults-only screening by default, with beer, wine and teas and coffees being sipped rather than soft drinks and juices. But also bliss, because I didn’t miss any dialogue on account of some screaming child.

The film’s ending leaves blatant scope for Toy Story 6. Given the animators’ concerns about the rise (and rise and rise) of technological devices in children’s lives, what will the next one be about? Artificial intelligence, I suppose. The toys should win that war fairly easily I would have thought.

Worth seeing? On balance, yes. I mean, it kept my attention despite me being jaded because it was too darn hot.