New Delhi, July 30 -- The case against sequels held for about three years after Toy Story 4. Pixar, which had dispatched Woody and the gang with what read at the time as a clean narrative ending in 2019, spent the intervening stretch sending its next four films directly to Disney+ rather than theaters, a commercial necessity during the pandemic that slid, by 2022, into something closer to institutional habit. The studio's first purely theatrical return, Lightyear, underperformed at the multiplex. Elemental opened to numbers summer analysts called disappointing before the picture found its footing weeks later.

$448.6 million domestic and $573.5 million overseas for a running global total of $1.022 billion, making it the highest-grossing f...