Tim Allen has slammed the underperforming Toy Story spin-off film, Lightyear, after the conservative star was replaced voicing the character by Chris Evans.
The 69-year-old actor blasted the film – which recently flopped on opening weekend – during an interview with Extra on Wednesday.
Although he said he personally liked the story, Allen criticized the film’s lack of continuty to the beloved Toy Story franchise and his exclusion from the project by the ‘new team’ at the helm.
‘It’s a wonderful story, it just doesn’t seem to have any connection to the toy,’ Allen said. ‘It has no relationship to Buzz.’
‘We talked about this many years ago…but the brass that did the first four movies is not this. It’s a whole new team that really had nothing to do with the first movies.
‘I’ve stayed out of this.’
Allen went on to say that he did not originally think the film would be animated like the previous Toy Story films and that it was actually live-action.
He said: ‘There’s really no Toy Story Buzz without Woody. I’m not sure what the idea—I’m a plot guy. It would seem to be a big adventure story, and as I see, it’s not a big adventure story.
Allen voiced Buzz Lightyear alongside Tom Hanks who voiced cowboy Woody in the 1995 Pixar film Toy Story, which scooped $373 million at the box office and has since become of the most well-loved animated films of all time.
He then reprised the role in several sequel films and animated shorts, and voiced the animated astro-toy as recently as 2019 in Toy Story 4.
Many Toy Story fans had speculated previously whether Tim was replaced by Chris Evans in the prequel was a politically motivated decision, based on Allen’s support of the Republican party and conservative politics.
Allen has been quoted as saying he ‘liked that Donald Trump pissed people off’ and has previously referred to himself as ‘politically, kind of an anarchist’.
Asked about attending Trump’s inauguration by Jimmy Kimmel in 2017, he said: ‘You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes.
‘This is like Thirties Germany. I don’t know what happened. If you’re not part of the group, ”You know what we believe is right”, I go, ”Well, I might have a problem with that”. I’m a comedian, I like going on both sides.’
He added: ‘I literally don’t preach anything. What I’ve done is I’ve just not joined into, as I call it, the ”we culture”. I’m not telling anybody else how to live. I don’t like that.’
Allen also told Fox those who slam Trump in Hollywood are hypocrites, adding: ‘What I find odd in Hollywood is that they didn’t like Trump because he was a bully.’
‘But if you had any kind of inkling that you were for Trump, you got bullied for doing that. And that’s where this gets a little hypocritical to me.’
Lightyear flopped in its first weekend in theaters, with the new Toy Story spin-off film earning only $51.7 million in North America.
Not only did the movie open lower than expected last week, but it also failed to conquer Jurassic World: Dominion, which held on to the first-place spot with $58.7 million in its second weekend.
The movie was also pulled from 14 countries for including a gay kissing scene that Disney refused to pull.
Malaysia’s Film Censorship Board said it approved the movie with parental guidance for those under 13 on the condition that scenes and dialogues ‘found to contain elements promoting the LGBT lifestyle’ that violated guidelines were ‘cut and muted.’
But Disney apparently did not agree to the conditions and decided instead to cancel the screening, the board said, adding that it would not compromise on any LGBTQ scenes.
It comes after Disney came out against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, whose official title is the Parental Rights in Education Bill, last month after facing immense pressure from staff members.
The bill prohibits public school instruction on gender and sexuality between kindergarten and third grade.
Allen’s disappearance had sparked criticism of Disney Pixar for what some believe was a shallow, politically-motivated silencing of an instantly recognizable voice.
Author Brigitte Gabriel tweeted: ‘Tim Allen is the only person capable of being Buzz Lightyear. Did Disney cancel him for being a Republican?’.
Other users said it was ‘sad’ that Allen had been ‘canceled for wrong-think and hit out at Disney’s ‘woke’ agenda.
It comes after comedian Allen had his sitcom Last Man Standing canceled by network ABC in 2017 despite it being one of the most popular shows at the time.
Many speculated it was because Allen simply refused to shy away from voicing his political stance.
According to The Daily Telegraph, he said: ‘I’m doing Tim and I don’t care.
‘It makes you feel so nervous to hear yourself out loud – it almost feels wrong. It’s like trying to say, ‘Bond, James Bond,’ and you’re like, ‘Nope, nope, nope – that’s for someone else.”
Chris’ character in the origins picture is not quite the character that Tim Allen played.
In Toy Story, Buzz was merely a toy who thought he was an astronaut.
Lightyear, explained Chris, is supposed to be the movie the toy is based on.
In the plot of the new film, Buzz is a Space Ranger, marooned on a hostile planet, who tries to find his way home. The character is a bit smarter that the toy Buzz.
‘[Tim Allen] is Buzz Lightyear to me too – I grew up on these movies,’ he said.
‘So, you certainly want to use it as a template…And he did such a good job, I would be a fool to not absorb some of the choices. But at the same time you have to kind of make some kind of fresh track in the snow.’
Evans also recently reexplained the plot of the film almost two years after a tweet he initially put out was ridiculed by fans.
At the time he wrote, ‘And just to be clear, this isn’t Buzz Lightyear the toy. This is the origin story of the human Buzz Lightyear that the toy is based on.’