I just watched it about 2 hours ago and thought it was a pretty solid sci-fi movie. I think it gets a lot more hate than it deserves honestly. Everyone speaks to its disconnect from Toy Story as a reason that it did poorly but for me at least I couldn’t care less, he’s a cool character on his own. I even loved the Buzz Lightyear cartoon when I was a kid and that had nothing to do with Toy Story either as far as I can remember, and that didn’t seem to be a problem at the time. Admittedly the “this is the movie Andy watched” text at the beginning of the movie definitely felt like a weird add-on after the fact because it makes no sense that this is supposed to be a 90s movie, but I can’t understand how that apparently ruined the movie for a bunch of people. It’s pretty easy to ignore.

My take on why it didn’t do well is just because it wasn’t a great movie, it was just fine. And since it wasn’t really targeted to kids in the same way most of Pixar is, I think it needed to be great in order to have a more significant impact. I was excited to watch it because it looked like a cool sci-fi movie, and frankly it was, but that’s probably not how you get a ton of people to watch your movie.