🎬 Released 20 Years Ago Today, ‘Cars’ Was the Real Engine That Drove Pixar — Woody Magazine, Jun. 9, 2026

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Jun. 9, 2026 (Tue.)

🎬 Film

Released 20 Years Ago Today, Cars Was the Real Engine That Drove Pixar

Its reviews were Pixar's lowest; its merchandise, the studio's highest. That wallet is what kept Pixar itself intact through the Disney takeover.

Twenty years ago today, Pixar released its seventh feature, Cars — the story of Lightning McQueen, a swaggering race car who learns humility in a forgotten desert town. The reviews were kind, but for Pixar, strangely cool. Cars landed at 75 percent on Rotten Tomatoes — a "fresh" score, but the first time a Pixar film had slipped below 90, after a spotless run from Toy Story to The Incredibles. Even Roger Ebert, who gave it three stars out of four, hedged.

Lovely to look at, plenty of fun — yet missing, Ebert wrote, the "extra push" of Pixar's best.— Roger Ebert, three-star review of Cars, 2006

It looked like the first scratch on a perfect record. But Pixar kept a second ledger — not at the box office, on the shelf. Lightning McQueen became a plush toy, a bedsheet, a lunchbox, a toothbrush. In the five years after release, Cars merchandise is estimated to have sold around $10 billion — the kind of figure that sits beside Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man. It was more than every Pixar film had earned in theaters, combined. The movie with the softest reviews made the company the most money.

$10 billion

Estimated Cars merchandise sales in the film's first five years — more than Pixar's entire theatrical box office up to that point.

The timing was uncanny. Cars was the last film Pixar delivered as an independent studio, arriving just as Disney bought the company for $7.4 billion — announced in January 2006, closed in May, in theaters by June. Pixar's final independent picture instantly became the biggest cash machine in its history.

For Pixar, a vault like that was by design, not luck. When Steve Jobs pushed the studio to go public in 1995, the point was to build a cushion for the day a film flopped. Ed Catmull, who ran Pixar for decades, once put the logic more plainly: mix the films that will sell with the films that won't, and spread the risk across the whole slate.

However well Up does, Catmull noted, "you'll never sell a lot of toy walkers" — and spreading that risk is the entire point.— Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Disney Animation (Variety, 2015)

At the sellable end of Catmull's equation sat Lightning McQueen. At the far end sat what Pixar made right after the merger: a rat who cooks (Ratatouille), a near-silent robot in love (WALL-E), an old man who floats his house away under a canopy of balloons (Up). WALL-E's early drafts barely resembled the finished film; Ratatouille was rebuilt so completely that its director was replaced mid-production. By any commercial formula, these were hard sells. All three turned a profit in the end — but that's hindsight. The moment each pitch hit the table, having a Lightning McQueen in the vault changed the math entirely.

So to file Cars under its review score is to see only half of it. The film with the mildest notices is the one that kept Pixar Pixar. As it happens, 2006 fell exactly twenty years after Pixar became an independent company in 1986; that twentieth-year film turns twenty itself today. And this very evening in Los Angeles, Toy Story 5 holds its premiere — it opens across the U.S. on June 19 — with Pixar leaning, once again, on a dependable franchise. The formula Cars proved twenty years ago still holds: you need the friend who sells to make the friend who's a gamble.

💡 The takeaway

Cars wasn't Pixar's weak link. It was the wallet that let Pixar keep being Pixar.

Sources & further reading

• Source ↗ The Walt Disney Company, "Disney To Acquire Pixar" (press release) — thewaltdisneycompany.com
• Source ↗ Wikipedia, "Cars (film)" — en.wikipedia.org
• Source ↗ RogerEbert.com, "A Collection of Roger's Pixar Reviews" — rogerebert.com
• Source ↗ The Globe and Mail, "How Pixar's Cars became the ultimate merchandising vehicle" — theglobeandmail.com
• Source ↗ Variety, "Creative Impact Honoree: Ed Catmull" — variety.com
• Source ↗ Ed Catmull & Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc. (2014) — penguinrandomhouse.com
• Source ↗ Pixar Animation Studios, "Toy Story 5" — pixar.com

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