Tom Hanks starred as Woody in “Toy Story 5” at 69 years old. Now he’s contemplating what animators could do with his vocal likeness if he wasn’t around for another sequel.
“Toy Story 5” opened over the weekend, setting a franchise record with a $312 million global box office including $160 million domestically. Questions about returning for another installment are already being floated amid the film’s strong opening.
“If you’re gonna do another ‘Toy Story,’ it better be worthwhile,” Hanks said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “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,” he added.
The film explores how technology has changed children’s relationships with toys. Director Andrew Stanton, who has been attached to the franchise since the original 1995 film, said it is likely the fifth and final installment.
In the age of artificial intelligence, Hanks suggested there could be a scenario in which Pixar uses his vocal recordings from the past 30 years to generate a performance without him.
“Time is undefeated,” he said. “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.”
Several voice actors have since died throughout the franchise’s history, including Don Rickles and Jim Varney. Its stars are aging as well: Hanks is nearing 70, Tim Allen is 73 and Joan Cusack is 63.
Both Hanks and Allen told EW that an AI-generated sequel is “a scary thought.”
This is not the first time Hanks has pondered his legacy and how AI could continue an actor’s career after death. He has referenced how his work in “The Polar Express” pointed toward the future of animation and the use of an actor’s likeness in computer-generated performances.
“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,’” Hanks said in an interview on “The Adam Buxton Podcast” in 2023. “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.”
“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,” he added. “It’s going to have some degree of lifelike quality. That’s certainly an artistic challenge but it’s also a legal one.”
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