Cars Is 20, and Disney Spent More on One Ride Than Pixar Spent on the Film

The re-release opened on 4 September in 2,900 theatres and took an estimated $6.1 million over three days, sixth for the weekend. That is a Sunday estimate rather than a confirmed actual, and no four-day Labor Day figure has been published, so treat it as approximate.

What is not approximate is the date. Cars premiered on 26 May 2006 and opened wide on 9 June 2006. A September re-release is the twentieth anniversary of the year, not of the film. The reason appears to be that Disney and exhibitors mark "Lightning McQueen Day" on 5 September — 9/5, for the 95 painted on the car. A Friday opening puts the first Saturday on that date.

So the anniversary of a film whose foundational criticism was that it existed to sell toys has been scheduled around a number that exists to sell toys. Cinemark is selling a $49.95 Lightning McQueen popcorn bucket alongside it, several times the price of a ticket.

Disney spent more on one ride than Pixar spent on the movie

Cars cost $120 million and grossed $462.0 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo. It was the first Pixar feature to score below 90% on Rotten Tomatoes — the studio's previous floor was A Bug's Life at 92% — and it lost the Best Animated Feature Oscar to Happy Feet, in a run where Pixar won the two years before and the year after.

Six years later, Disney opened Radiator Springs Racers at Disney California Adventure at a reported cost of over $200 million: the most expensive attraction at the Disneyland Resort and one of the most expensive theme park attractions in the world, absorbing roughly 18% of a $1.1 billion park overhaul.

Disney spent about two thirds more on one ride than Pixar spent making the entire film. And it worked. Park attendance went from 6,341,000 in 2011 to 7,775,000 in 2012 — a 23% jump — and kept climbing to 8,769,000 by 2014. Bob Iger's line on why the overhaul was needed: "Any time you do something mediocre with your brand, that's withdrawal."

The commercial peak and the critical nadir are the same film

Cars 2 holds the lowest Tomatometer score of any Pixar feature ever made — 40% across 216 reviews — and the lowest audience score too, at 50%. The New York Times called it the first genuinely negative response Pixar had ever received.

It is also, comfortably, the highest-grossing film in the franchise: $559.9 million worldwide, against $462.0M for the original and $383.9M for Cars 3.

The accusation levelled at it — that it existed to move merchandise — is the one John Lasseter dismissed as coming from "people who don't know the facts, rushing to judge." He directed both films, executive produced Cars 3 and both Planes pictures, took a leave of absence from Disney in November 2017 following allegations of inappropriate workplace conduct, and left the company at the end of 2018.

About that $10 billion

The figure everyone quotes is real, and it is fifteen years old and misquoted in three ways.

Its source is a Los Angeles Times piece from 21 June 2011, and the wording is: in the five years since its 2006 release, Cars had generated global retail sales "approaching $10 billion, according to Disney."

• "Approaching," not "reached." The round number is a rounded-up hedge.
• It is retail sales — what consumers spent at checkout across all licensees — not Disney revenue. Disney's own royalty take has never been broken out.
• It is attributed to Disney and has never been independently audited.
• It covers the first five years only, and Disney has published no update since — nothing covering Cars 3, the Planes films, Cars on the Road, or a decade and a half of Cars Land.

The best-reviewed thing in the franchise never played a cinema

Cars on the Road, nine shorts dropped on Disney+ in September 2022 with barely a marketing campaign, holds 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Higher than Cars (75%), higher than Cars 3 (70%), more than double Cars 2 (40%).

The caveat is that it rests on fourteen reviews, which is not a lot. But twenty years and roughly $1.4 billion in theatrical grosses into this franchise, its critical high-water mark is a set of shorts nobody promoted.

Magic Kingdom is demolishing 1971 to build a land from a Planes film

This is the detail that deserves more attention than it gets. Piston Peak is not a location from Cars. It is from Planes: Fire & Rescue (2014) — a DisneyToon Studios film, not a Pixar one, which scored 44% on Rotten Tomatoes and came from a studio Disney shut down on 28 June 2018, laying off 75 staff and cancelling Planes 3 outright.

To build Piston Peak National Park, announced in August 2024, Disney permanently closed Rivers of America, Tom Sawyer Island and the Liberty Belle Riverboat on 6 July 2025 — Magic Kingdom fixtures dating to the park's 1971 opening. Construction began in 2025. There is no announced opening date, no published cost, and the attraction does not officially have a name yet.

The most disposable corner of the Cars universe is displacing the park's original landscape.

Is Cars 4 real?

No — not as anything Disney or Pixar has announced. It appears on no release slate; the confirmed upcoming Pixar features are Hoppers and Toy Story 5 (2026), Gatto (2027), Ghost Market and Incredibles 3 (2028) and Coco 2 (2029).

What exists is conditional. The Cars 3 producers said in 2017 that if there were "a good story to tell… it's worth investing." Owen Wilson has said concepts have been discussed. Franchise creative director Jay Ward said in December 2023 that "there are more Cars things brewing" — note things, not a film. The confirmed forward slate is television and theme parks.

Which is, in its way, the whole argument. The lowest-rated Pixar film of its era became the studio's most durable commercial asset, and it did it almost entirely off-screen.