Though Lightyear was conceived as a Toy Story spin-off, its relationship with the Pixar franchise actually backfired significantly, hurting the film's chances for success. The Toy Story franchise is one of the most beloved animated franchises of all time, enjoyed by audiences of all ages across the globe. Its massive success and relevance to pop culture cannot be understated, and this is something that helped secure Pixar's reputation as a titan of modern animation and led to the creation of Lightyear.
In that regard, making more movies within the franchise makes perfect sense. Audiences are given a more in-depth look at its world and its characters, and the connection to the Toy Story movies, as well as Pixar's involvement, should secure a sizeable box office. Put simply, making another movie within a successful franchise is a relatively safe bet for the studio - and this seemed to be the case with Lightyear, too. Billed as the story behind the toy from Toy Story, Lightyear was not just an opportunity to explore a different element of the Toy Story world, but also to recast one of its iconic roles, with Chris Evans voicing Buzz for the spin-off.
However, the Toy Story connection actually proved to be far less beneficial for Lightyear than one might have originally suspected. Though the link actually proved to be less substantial than it initially appeared, Lightyear still had impossible Toy Story standards to live up to, and that effectively doomed the spin-off. As Lightyear is visually and thematically distinct from the Toy Story movies, the issue is actually far more complex than it seems at a glance, but ultimately, Lightyear's links to Toy Story proved to do more harm than good.
Lightyear's Prequel/Spin-Off Meta Premise Was Too Complex
The first hurdle that Lightyear was forced to clear was establishing its place within the franchise's canon. Billed as a prequel/spin-off, the official status of Lightyear's place in Pixar canon is that it's the movie that inspired the toy that appears in Toy Story. Though it's a relatively simple explanation in one sense, it's actually somewhat difficult to explain to the younger members of Lightyear's potential audience, and that's a bigger issue than Pixar may have anticipated.
This confusion presents other issues, too. Where does Lightyear fit within the Pixar shared universe theory? Is the story of Lightyear supposedly a "true" story, or is it a movie-within-a-movie? How much of the film's story is considered canon within the Toy Story movies, and will the inconsistencies ever be reconciled? These questions make Lightyear's relatively straightforward story unnecessarily convoluted, as it plagues its narrative with complications that only arise as a result of its vaguely defined place within the wider franchise.
Lightyear Doesn't Match Toy Story's Tone
It's not just Lightyear's narrative that is difficult to reconcile with Toy Story, but its tone, too. Though Lightyear is still family-friendly, its ability to appeal to a younger audience is less obvious, as it adopts a far more serious tone than the Toy Story movies. What's more, its washed-out color palette means that Lightyear looks different from Toy Story, further proving just how different the spin-off is from the original movies.
Though both Lightyear and Toy Story see their characters facing mortal danger, Toy Story's focus is on literal toys and the persistent use of gentle comedy helps to diffuse the tension in a way that Lightyear isn't able to. Lightyear's characters are human, and the film sees Buzz's best friend die in the first act, and that tonal inconsistency makes the wedge between Lightyear and Toy Story seem all the wider. The tonal differences between Toy Story and Lightyear are relatively small, but they're enough to make the two difficult to reconcile with one another.
Lightyear's Sci-Fi Is Too Far Removed From Toy Story
Another way in which Lightyear and Toy Story don't match up is in the former's genre-heavy story. As the spin-off is distinctly rooted in science fiction, Lightyear feels more like Star Wars than it does Toy Story, and that's something that runs deep throughout the film, making it inescapable. Lightyear's story features not just spaceships and alien planets, but its plot is driven by scientific ideas such as time travel and the theory of relativity, and that again makes it feel even further away from Toy Story.
Using such a high-concept premise, Lightyear sets itself so far apart from Toy Story that it becomes hard to make the connection between them. To start with, Lightyear makes these differences feel superficial, but by its third act, it's clear that the separation is far more substantial. In fact, Lightyear even changes Toy Story 2's Zurg twist, injecting even more sci-fi into the pair's dynamic than would ever have been necessary. Lightyear's commitment to standing apart by embracing its sci-fi inspirations is commendable in principle, but in practice, it makes its status as a spin-off feel like nothing more than a cheap trick to capitalize on Toy Story's popularity that is never properly paid off.
Toy Story Nostalgia Led To Unfavorable Comparisons
Perhaps the worst aspect of Lightyear's Toy Story connection is the way that it drags both films down. As they present as two very separate entities, the idea that they're linked feels like a burden rather than an asset. What's more, the massive success of Toy Story set a bar for Lightyear's quality that the spin-off was doomed to fall short of, meaning that it was never going to be able to properly live up to the hype.
As the Toy Story movies are considered among the best of all the Pixar movies, Lightyear's failure was simultaneously disappointing and inevitable. To successfully live up to the expectations set by decades of Toy Story nostalgia - especially when Buzz Lightyear already had a spin-off/prequel animated series in the '00s - was practically an impossibility, and though Lightyear is by no stretch of the imagination a bad movie, it simply couldn't match Toy Story's quality. The unavoidable comparisons caused by Lightyear's status as a spin-off were never going to favor Lightyear, and it came off much worse than it deserved to as a result of its Toy Story connection.