Toy Story is coming back for another installment, and original film director John Lasseter is on board to direct. The film will be released on June 16th, 2017. This is likely to be exciting, if trepidatious news for fans of Pixar and the series: Pixar has increasingly relied on sequels for big hits, while creating great new properties has been put on the back burner. It's likely that Pixar's move toward sequels is in part a result of being owned by Disney, which would rather see Pixar continue to mine its most successful properties of which Toy Story is perhaps the biggest.

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The story for this fourth film is being created by Lasseter alongside Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, Pete Docter, the director of Up, and Andrew Stanton, the director of Finding Nemo so this is truly coming from a team of Pixar all stars. They have also all worked on prior Toy Story films. The screenplay will be written by Rashida Jones, who has starred on Parks and Recreation and The Office, and Will McCormack, who previously wrote Celeste & Jesse Forever alongside Jones. Galyn Susman, who has been producing Toy Story shorts for Pixar, is producing the film too.

"We love these characters so much; they are like family to us," Lasseter says in a statement. "We dont want to do anything with them unless it lives up to or surpasses whats gone before. Toy Story 3 ended Woody and Buzzs story with Andy so perfectly that for a long time, we never even talked about doing another Toy Story movie. But when Andrew, Pete, Lee, and I came up with this new idea, I just could not stop thinking about it. It was so exciting to me, I knew we had to make this movie and I wanted to direct it myself."

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Yay? Nay?