Toy Story 6?
Toy Story 5 is proving that the franchise has never run out of steam. The newest sequel to the banner Pixar film set a series record with a $312 million opening at the global box office. So, it stands to reason that Disney would not be ready to put the franchise back in its box. But is Tom Hanks down to return for a Toy Story 6? According to Variety, he tells Entertainment Weekly, “If you’re gonna do another Toy Story, it better be worthwhile. It better be great. You better be examining some theme that is not just dragging it out because people like the title. I mean, it is a huge corporate business without a doubt, I’m not gonna discount that. But unless it’s good, new, fresh, there’s no reason to do it at all.”
Disneys new plaything
The newest Toy Story sees our favorite childhood characters try to keep up with a modern age with advanced technology. Life always imitates art, as Hanks also finds himself at odds with technology’s capabilities of duplicating his voice. The star has thought about the fact that even if he doesn’t return to do Woody’s voice, Disney is fully capable of using AI to reproduce his pipes for future projects. He explained,
Time is undefeated. The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me. Every word we have ever recorded in time in Toy Story is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want.”
Both Hanks and his co-star Tim Allen have said that this notion is “a scary thought” when appearing on The Adam Buxton Podcast. Hanks has already had a big brush with deepfake technology with his time-themed Robert Zemeckis film Here. Hanks expounded on actors’ new ability to be timeless in movies,
The first time we did a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked in a computer — literally what we looked like — was a movie called The Polar Express. We saw this coming, we saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones from inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. That has only grown a billion-fold since then and we see it everywhere.”
Hanks added,
Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deep fake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on. Outside the understanding of AI and deepfake, there’ll be nothing to tell you that it’s not me and me alone. And it’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”
