Mon, September 7, 2026 at 3:32 PM UTC
Mattel and Disney have renewed their multi-year global licensing agreement for the Toy Story franchise, tying the deal directly to the film’s 30th anniversary and the June 19, 2026 release of Toy Story 5, according to the companies’ joint press release distributed via Business Wire. Toy Story premiered November 22, 1995, as the first entirely computer-animated feature film ever released, according to EDN’s history of the technical milestone, which makes this year’s anniversary a genuine turning point in film history, not just a marketing calendar date.
What the Renewed Deal Actually Covers
The renewed agreement spans a wide product footprint: action figures, vehicles, radio-control toys, board games, and plush, along with new UNO and Imaginext tie-ins and crossovers with classic Mattel games like Kerplunk! and Tumblin’ Monkeys, per the companies’ announcement. Nick Karamanos, Mattel’s senior vice president of entertainment partnerships, said in the release that Toy Story “has been a beloved cornerstone of storytelling and imagination for generations,” while Disney Consumer Products’ Paul Southern said the new product wave is meant to “pay tribute to the legacy of this beloved brand” while building anticipation for the fifth film.
Three Decades of an Unbroken Toy Partnership
What makes this renewal notable isn’t that it exists, it’s that Mattel and Disney have never really stopped working together on this specific franchise since 1995. Toy Story was, famously, a movie about toys that then generated an entire toy aisle’s worth of real merchandise, and Mattel has held some piece of that license for the better part of thirty years. According to Disney’s own 30th-anniversary rollout reported by License Global, the celebration extends well past new action figures: theme parks worldwide are running special anniversary experiences, Disney California Adventure is bringing back its “Better Together: A Pixar Pals’ Celebration,” and the full Toy Story film library is streaming on Disney+.
Why the Timing Matters More Than Usual
Anniversary licensing renewals happen constantly across the entertainment industry, but this one is landing at a genuinely unusual moment for the franchise: a 30-year milestone stacked directly against a new theatrical release, rather than a quiet retrospective with no new content attached. Toy Story 5, directed by Andrew Stanton with Kenna Harris co-directing, arrives in theaters in June 2026, meaning the anniversary merchandise wave and the new-movie merchandise wave are effectively the same wave. For a franchise built on a joke about toys becoming obsolete the moment kids move on to something newer, that’s a fairly pointed piece of irony: three decades in, the toy aisle built around Woody and Buzz still hasn’t gone anywhere.
