It seems that Toy Story 5, Frozen 3 and Zootopia 2 are officially in the works.
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, has announced this during the first quarter results conference, although he has not offered more details and added that they will reveal more information about these productions “soon”. He called investing in franchises an example of how “they are leaning on our unrivaled brands”.
The move to franchises isn’t entirely surprising, especially after original animated movies like Weird World (which came out last year) didn’t garner great success. And the three series mentioned by Iger have exceeded 1,000 million dollars collected at the world box office in their latest releases.
Frozen has continued to be one of Disney Animation’s most lucrative hits, with Frozen 2 racking up $1.4 billion worldwide. For its part, Zootopia grossed $1.02 billion and spawned a Disney+ series, with rumors of a sequel going on for years.
Toy Story is still synonymous with Pixar, and Toy Story 4 grossed $1.07 billion. However, the Toy Story spin-off film (Lightyear) was less successful last year, grossing just $226 million at the box office and drawing all kinds of reviews.
The news was a brief bright spot in an earnings presentation that was generally quite downbeat. Iger also announced that Disney would cut 7,000 jobs and they talked about the first quarterly loss of Disney+ subscribers. He also revealed that an Avatar attraction is coming to Disneyland, though he did not offer any further details.