Toy Story 4 has surpassed all expectations – both with critics and at the box office. The fourth and final instalment in the Toy Story franchise is being heralded as an almost perfect film. With a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel is undeniably a hit.
When was Toy Story 4 written?
Fans were led to believe Toy Story 3 was the final film in the franchise.
In fact, Toy Story director Lee Unkrich definitively said: “We don’t have any plans for Toy Story 4.”
However, a recent interview on ComingSoon.Net with Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley and producers Mark Nielsen and Jonas Rivera has now revealed this to be false.
Cooley said: “Andrew Stanton one of the writers, who’s written on all the Toy Story films, one of the godfathers of Toy Story, he actually started the outline for number 4 while 3 was still finishing.
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“But he kept it secret. We didn’t know, I’m speaking for all of us.”
Rivera continued: “That started to light us up a little bit, and slowly, we started to crack that open and go:
“‘What would happen if Woody did everything right, he survived it all, he landed on his feet with Bonnie.’
“And what we realized in that discussion was the end of 3 is really the end of Andy’s story, but the story of Toy Story is Woody….
“Now that I’m saying it, I’m realising Andrew’s kids had gone off to college and moved out.
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“So there’s definitely some of that in there. Like, what do you do when you’ve done everything right and your life’s not over? You have to reinvent yourself.
“And that was kind of the crack in the nerve, like okay, how would Woody do that? That was interesting to us.”
Cooley said: “It was interesting. We know this character. What would he do in this new situation?
“So we just kept going down these different paths, and just a random thing of coming up with Forky.
“And then we were like, ‘Well, actually, Forky forces him to explain what it means to be a toy.’
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“And so, all of these things just started to kind of fall in line very slowly over time.
“And just speaking about that part of Woody on the road with Forky talking about basically what it means to not have your kid living at home anymore.
“When Andrew wrote that, I read it and was crying because it was just so awesomely written.
“And I even told him like, ‘Nobody else could write this. You’ve experienced this and I could feel it on the page there.’”
Toy Story 4 is now playing in cinemas.