Steve Jobs became a billionaire thanks to a Pixar gamble. Now ‘Toy Story 5’ is breaking box office records thanks to that bet

The newest installment of the movie that made Pixar a powerhouse and Steve Jobs a billionaire just secured the biggest opening weekend in the history of the Toy Story franchise. Just over 30 years after the original movie was released, Toy Story 5 amassed a staggering $312 million for its opening weekend, topping Toy Story 4’s $238 million debut in 2019. The newest film, which follows Woody and Buzz Lightyear as they battle a shiny new tablet for the attention of their owner, Bonnie, has already trumped its eye-popping budget of $250 million. Another $100 million worth of marketing costs means the film is not yet profitable. But if its opening weekend is any indication, Toy Story 5 is set to break records. Since the first film was released in 1995, the franchise has driven $16 billion in revenue to Disney, which bought Pixar in 2006, thanks in part to retail sales for consumer products, games, and publishing, which add to the franchise’s massive box office receipts. While Toy Story has defined itself as one of Pixar’s biggest success stories, less well known is the role that Apple cofounder Steve Jobs played. Job’s role at Pixar After Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, he was looking for new projects at the intersection of creativity and technology. Through a connection, Jobs stumbled upon what was then the computer animation division of Star Wars creator George Lucas’ production company Lucasfilm and was immediately impressed, wrote Walter Isaacson in his biography of the Apple cofounder. This rag-tag crew inside Lucasfilm was focused on making hardware and software for rendering digital images, but it also had a team making short films led by the cartoon-loving creative John Lasseter, who later became the chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Lucas was going through a divorce at the time and wanted to offload the division, but was having trouble finding a buyer. So Ed Catmull, who would later become president of Pixar, so