Toy Story 5 Wins: Disney Bought the Decade
Which sounds like news until you realise it was never really a question — Toy Story 5 was always going to make a billion dollars the same way the sun was always going to rise, which is to say inevitably, mechanically, and without anyone involved losing a moment of sleep.
Toy Story 5 Wins: Disney Bought the Decade
Pixar made a billion dollars. Again. Which sounds like news until you realise it was never really a question — *Toy Story 5* was always going to make a billion dollars the same way the sun was always going to rise, which is to say inevitably, mechanically, and without anyone involved losing a moment of sleep. What Disney's latest earnings report actually confirmed is that the franchise is now worth an estimated $16 billion, a number so large it stops feeling like money and starts feeling like mythology. Josh D'Amaro's first full quarter as CEO looked exactly like what a first full quarter should look like when you're inheriting the most profitable entertainment machine ever assembled: theme parks up, Disney+ and Hulu doubling streaming profit, and a $100 million tariff refund sitting in the accounts like a cherry nobody ordered but everybody appreciated.
Meanwhile, the film that is genuinely interesting — Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's *La Bola Negra*, their Federico García Lorca-inspired epic that took the Cannes Best Director prize — is doing something that almost no prestige film does anymore with conviction: it is making people wait. Netflix has extended its theatrical window to 47 days, pushing the opening to October, which in awards calendar language translates as *we believe in this thing*. A 47-day window in 2026 is a statement. It is the streaming giant saying, quietly, that some films still need the room to breathe before they arrive in your living room.
And then there is Samantha Morton, who deserves more column inches than the news cycle is currently giving her. Her performance as Circe in *The Odyssey* — and she has said publicly that the role felt like every woman and all women — has placed a two-time Oscar nominee back exactly where she should have been for the last decade. The aside about *River Queen*, where the director apparently cast her believing she was Emily Watson, is the kind of industry detail that lands like a small bruise. She called it a sad job. The restraint in that phrase is doing considerable heavy lifting.
The verdict: Disney owns the past, *La Bola Negra* might own the awards season, and Samantha Morton deserved better from all of it ten years earlier.
