Tim Allen brought his legendary sarcastic and hysterical voice to the character of Buzz Lightyear in the 1995 box office smash “Toy Story” and its subsequent sequels, but he was unceremoniously booted from the latest film in the series, “Lightyear.” Many suspect his conservative views cost him the job.
Buzz (I mean Allen) gave the movie a poor review in an interview on Wednesday with Extra
It’s a wonderful story, it just doesn’t seem to have any connection to the toy. Buzz has nothing to do with it.
Because he basically just bodyslammed it with one sentence, we could easily stop there. You wouldn’t go to see the film if it had no connection with Buzz. But, he goes on:
We talked about this many years ago…but the brass that did the first four movies is not this. It’s a whole new team that really had nothing to do with the first movies.
I’ve stayed out of this.
“Lightyear” is a flop with audiences two weeks into its release, with many blaming woke moves like replacing Allen (with actor Chris Evans) and inserting a lesbian kiss into the film.
The box office take from “Lightyear” plunged a disastrous 65 percent from its already-weak opening weekend, leaving it with a total domestic haul of $89 million as of Tuesday. Writes entertainment writer Brendan Morrow in The Week, “The Toy Story spinoff from Pixar was expected to be one of the biggest hits of the summer movie season. Instead, it’s been a box office disappointment.”
In my view, it didn’t stand a chance once they got rid of Allen. Buzz Lightyear IS him and the movie’s origin story requires that he be the voice. “Everybody Loves Raymond” star Patricia Heaton agrees:
The trailer for Buzz Lightyear is out and I have to say that Disney/Pixar made an enormous mistake by not casting my friend. @ofctimallenTim Allen as the original role, which he now owns. Tim IS Buzz! They would completely destroy this beloved, iconic character.
— Patricia Heaton (@PatriciaHeaton) June 14, 2022
This isn’t the first time Allen has been canned in “mysterious” circumstances. In 2017, ABC famously canceled his hit show “Last Man Standing,” even though it drew excellent ratings. Fox later took the show up. At the time, Allen tried to downplay any acrimony with ABC, but in 2018 he went on Norm McDonald’s podcast to say:
“You couldn’t have handled this worse. Not for me, ’cause I’ll survive, but there’s 190 of us that work there,” Allen said and added that the show did very well for ABC, even when the network “put us out to pasture” on Friday nights. “I have no idea why they did what they did.”
Allen has spoken of his conservative values in the past, and he attended Trump’s inauguration. Many feel that that move alone did in “Last Man Standing,” and maybe even cost him the “Lightyear” role. Allen confessed to the following:
Here, you need to be careful. You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody else believes. This is like ’30s Germany.
Woke, canceling companies are getting some comeuppance in recent months, and it couldn’t come soon enough. Making a “Lightyear” movie without Tim Allen leaves the film with no buzz at all, and Disney is paying for it at the box office.
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