It's not often you get movie scoops from publications like The Wall Street Journal, being, as they are, more enamoured of bar graphs than Batman. But the US publication recently ran an article about Disney Pixar no longer outsourcing their video game tie-ins and, almost in passing, revealed the much guarded plot to Toy Story 3.
According to the Journal, in the third movie "Woody the cowboy and his toy-box friends are dumped in a day-care center after their owner, Andy, leaves for college".
That sounds much like a spin on Jesse the Cowgirl's arc in Toy Story 2, where she was abandoned by her grown up owner (we can't think of a less harsh sounding term) and ended up in a junk sale.
It's a good path for the third and possibly final film. It could potentially bring the story of Woody and Buzz full circle, if they eventually end up in the hands of a new child to love them. It does, however, show that a lot of time's passed between Toy Story 2 and the new movie, since Andy was no more than 12 in that film. What would that mean for the toy characters? Will Woody be falling apart? Will all Buzz's paint be worn to nothing. God knows, after a few years, all our childhood toys were chewed, run over and generally scarred from too many interactions with the dog or waste disposal.
It certainly sounds promising to us. What do you think?