Tom Hanks is raising alarms about artificial intelligence and the future of his most enduring voice role, saying Disney could synthesize Woody’s voice for a sixth Toy Story film without him — and calling the prospect unsettling.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly days after Toy Story 5 opened to $312 million worldwide — a franchise record — the two-time Oscar winner laid out both a creative condition and a technological anxiety. On the creative side, he was direct: any sixth film would need a genuine reason to exist. “If you’re gonna do another Toy Story, it better be worthwhile.
It better be great. You better be examining some theme that is not just dragging it out because people like the title,” he said. “This is a massive corporate business, there is no doubt about that, but unless there is a genuinely great, new, and fresh idea, there’s no reason to do it all over again.”
The sharper admission came when Hanks turned to what Disney could do without his cooperation at all. Thirty-one years of Woody dialogue, spanning five films, outtakes, shorts, and ancillary recordings, sits in digital archives the studio owns. Feeding that material to AI systems could produce convincing new lines without Hanks ever entering a recording booth.
“Time is undefeated,” he said. “The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me. Every word we have ever recorded in time in Toy Story is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want.” Tim Allen, who returns as Buzz Lightyear, shared his unease. Both actors agreed the scenario is “a scary thought.”
Hanks has engaged with this territory before. He cited The Polar Express in 2004 as the first time he saw how performance data could be locked into a computer and reconstructed — a technology he noted has since grown “a billion-fold.” He has previously described AI’s ability to render him as a 32-year-old for any future project as simultaneously an artistic and legal challenge the industry has yet to resolve.
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The concern carries particular weight given Toy Story 5’s commercial momentum. Director Andrew Stanton has described the film as the second chapter in a trilogy built around the character of Bonnie, leaving a sixth installment structurally implied even as its creative necessity remains debated.
