You can’t argue with a billion dollars. Such is the likely reasoning behind Pixar’s decision to balance its fresh-idea features with sequels that keep the lights on (and Disney shareholders happy). Charting the trajectory of the movie biz’s most innovative animation studio in recent years is simple. 2018’s Incredibles 2 and 2019’s Toy Story 4 each crossed the b-word box office threshold. Then the pandemic and a run of hit (Turning Red, Soul) and miss (Elemental, Elio) features signaled the conclusion of Pixar’s creative peak.

So righting the ship means the studio went with what got them there. Inside Out 2 hoovered up $1.7 billion at the box office in 2024, and 2026’s Toy Story 5 — now streaming hot and fresh on Disney+ — proved to be a $1.1 billion slam dunk. And the future strategy seems to be carefully balancing sequels like Incredibles 3 and Coco 2 with new stories Gatto and Ghost Market, the former movies keeping the company in the black and the latter maintaining its integrity as artists that aren’t afraid to try new things (and potentially launch a new franchise worthy of its own sequels).

But here’s where the rubber meets the road: Do the sequels always maintain Pixar’s reputation as quality storytellers? The slippery answer is, not quite. And that’s why we’ve decided to rank those sequels from worst to best.

So where does Toy Story 5, now on Disney+, rank amongst its Pixar sequel siblings?

1. The Cars franchise is indefatigable proof that Pixar isn’t above making decisions with its pocketbook — or that it’s always conceptually on-point, since the anthropomorphization of vehicles brings up any number of troubling questions (e.g., why do school buses exist if there are no people to ride in them, and does that mean the cars gained sentience and committed genocide against humans? THE MIND BOGGLES). Anyway, Cars 2 proved to be a series of bad decisions ranging from hey let’s spoof spy movies like a zillion other movies have already done to let’s lean REALLY HARD into the Larry the Cable Guy-ness of it all!, and because parents want their kids to shut up and sit still for 102 minutes even if it costs them $47 for 47 cents worth of popcorn, the movie earned a very-impressive-for-2011 $560 million. Do not watch this deeply annoying film if you are older than nine. Or, preferably, if you’re breathing.

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2. And YOU thought this spot was reserved for Cars 3. Truth is, Cars 2 is the only objectively bad movie on this list, which means Monsters U — technically a prequel that could be titled When Sully Met Mike — dwells in the mediocrity realm, where unmemorable Pixar features roam around, helping us better appreciate the narrative depth and dexterity of the more memorable ones. Remember the amazing climactic action sequence with all the doors in Monsters Inc.? Well, this movie doesn’t have anything remotely comparable. At best, a cute time-waster.

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3. Turns out that Lightning McQueen’s struggle with pending obsolescence is more compelling than we thought. Which means Cars 3 is the only movie in the franchise with the existential subtext that characterizes the best Pixar flicks. On the other hand, the most memorable part of the film is the demolition derby sequence, not its emotional resonance. At least we temporarily set aside the sad truth that the sentient cars in Cars exist wholly to sell toys, happy meals, and NASCAR loyalty to children.

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4. Rendering this one essentially Jessie’s Story was a welcome shift away from the at-risk-of-going-stale Buzz-’n’-Woody dynamic. Endearing as that can be, it also invokes the most gut-wrenchingly sad abandoned-toy character arc in the series, which claws at the scars of our healing hearts. It’s also the most rickety screenplay of all the Toy Stories despite the modern-relevancy factor of a narrative that addresses the zombiefication of human youth via the dreaded Screen Time. A few big, hearty laughs keep us afloat here.

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5. Now it’s her turn to get lost! Pixar decided to test the tensile strength of a wildly popular supporting character — the endearingly absentminded blue tang Dory, voiced by Ellen DeGeneres — by making her the focus of her own adventure. Dory’s quest to find her parents is touching, and the movie’s final shot — Dory contemplating the possibilities of her life in a big, vast, scary, inspiring, beautiful world — is movingly poetic. But the movie doesn’t quite tap into the same magic that makes Finding Nemo a beloved classic.

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6. Some of you heathens out there don’t like Forky, and I’ll have none of your blithering nonsense. No other character in the Toy Story universe more accurately symbolizes the profound strangeness of the plaything beings in this world than an anthropomorphic spork crudely rendered out of wastebin fodder and brought to self-aware existence via the magic of a child playing with it. When Forky awakes, he believes he’s garbage, but eventually learns the value of self-worth from the ever-wise Woody. That and the heartbreaking arc of complex villain character Gabby Gabby reflect Toy Story 4’s robust thematic ambition.

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7. Contrasting the eternal optimism of Joy with frazzle-haired would-be antagonist Anxiety is the type of thing that inspires one to refer to Pixar creatives as Those Geniuses. It’s a step beyond the struggle she had with Sadness in the first film, marking the puberty-driven development of Riley, the young character in whose head these manifestations of emotions dwell. Significant portions of this sequel mirror the first Inside Out a little too closely, but consider it a variation on a theme that nevertheless delivers vigorous comedy layered with profound observations about adolescent development.

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8. THERE’S NO WAY THEY’RE GOING TO DIE PAINFULLY AND HORRIBLY IN A FIRE. But we cried anyway, didn’t we, goddammit. Toy Story 3 may be Pixar’s most emotionally manipulative film, the studio reaching the Summit of Conflicted Feelings by making us feel bad for submitting to the unrelenting processes of age and time. Okay, fine! I’ll nurture the emotional health of my toys by playing with them, even though I was born in the ’70s! Now leave me alone! But the balance of that wringing-out of our tear ducts with enormous laughs (tortilla scene, Buzz getting switched to Spanish-language mode) illustrates the impressive breadth of emotion these movies navigate.

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9. The Incredibleses are pure, delightful entertainment, not afraid of thematic weight, but never burdened by it either. Where filmmaker Brad Bird rendered the first film a lightly spoofy riff on superhero features (the monologue about monologuing is an all-timer), he shifts toward an X-Men-ish political allegory about acceptance of others — and doubles down on the action, delivering a half-dozen ripping sequences that are as visually dextrous as they are funny (e.g., Jack Jack vs. the raccoon, the Elasticycle chase). Incredibles 2 is a true banger, and more of you need to recognize that.

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10. Sarah McLachlan + Toy Story = peak shareholder value for Kimberly-Clark, manufacturer of Kleenex. It’s to the point where sitting through that scene, which explodes one’s heart into its composite molecules, has become nearly unbearable, representative of the studio’s diabolical M.O.: Hey Pixar, PLEASE stop making us feel like shit! But getting in touch with complicated emotions that may never be resolved has become a core part of the Pixar brand thanks to this movie, which points at the studio’s desire to generate products that are ever-so-slightly more high art than mere commerce — other film in the Pixar oeuvre is so very, you know, Pixar. And the whole thing about the toxicity of the collector’s market is fertile ground for comedy. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, etc. etc. Moral of the story: Don’t become a bitter ol’ creep like Stinky Pete.

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John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.