Toy Story 2 Was Saved By A Pixar Employee Who Disney Later Fired
The first three films of Pixar's "Toy Story" franchise would've been the perfect trilogy had the studio stopped after the third installment in 2010. "Toy Story 3" magnificently delivered one of the most touching and satisfying closures ever seen in animation for a generation that grew up on these movies. But IP has been king in the past decade, and "Toy Story" has been too popular and successful for Pixar not to utilize it further to infinity and beyond. Thus, we got "Toy Story 4" in 2019, and a fifth sequel is currently in the works, set to premiere this summer. Yet if it wasn't for a hard-working and diligent employee in the '90s, the franchise's trajectory may have been completely different.
It turns out that during the production of "Toy Story 2," a Pixar employee accidentally deleted the entire project in 1998. According to a 2012 interview (via The Next Web) with the studio's former Chief Technical Officer, Oren Jacob, two months worth of work was erased from all the servers due to a staff mishap. As he recalled, "[Larry Cutler, Pixar's then Technical Director] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody. He looked at the directory, and it had 40 files, and looked again, and it had four files. Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well, and we were like, 'Oh my god.'"
At the time, technical direction supervisor Galyn Susman was on maternity leave and took most of the files to work on at home. From those, they were able to recover the majority of what was lost and continue the work. Sadly, in 2023, Susman was among the 75 employees who got laid off by Disney (via IGN).
Despite the huge save, Toy Story 2 eventually received a near-complete overhaul
Despite Galyn Susman's heroic effort, the restoration of the lost files didn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. According to The Next Web, when the sequel's co-director John Lasseter and writers Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft went to look at how the movie was coming together at the end of 1998, they didn't like what they saw. A decision was made to completely rewrite the screenplay, and besides the main characters we knew from the first instalment, not much else made it to the final version, as Oren Jacob revealed.
The creative overhaul was an incredibly tough challenge to pull off in an extremely tight window until the 1999 release date, but the devoted Pixar staff has done the near-impossible. They not only finished the movie on time but turned it into an absolute triumph. Against its $90 million budget, "Toy Story 2" has crushed at the box office, garnering over $497 million worldwide. Critics praised it (the feature still boasts a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), audiences couldn't get enough of it, and time was pretty generous and kind to it in retrospect. The truth is, without this pivotal first sequel, "Toy Story" may not have become the multi-billion dollar franchise as we know it today.