At the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the audience rose to its feet as the final frames of Minions & Monsters flickered out. The seventh entry in Illumination’s billion-dollar franchise had just transported the yellow creatures to 1920s Hollywood, where their slapstick talents made them silent-film stars before the arrival of sound upended everything. Critics were quick to anoint it the best Minions film since the original, with The Wrap calling it “a love letter to classic Hollywood.” The ovation was a rare moment of critical embrace for a series often dismissed as corporate product.

That same week, in Mexican multiplexes, another animated stalwart was learning that affection does not always translate into record-breaking numbers. Toy Story 5 sold 5.2 million tickets in its opening weekend, a strong showing but a million short of the mark set by Super Mario Galaxy in April. On Sunday alone, 3.8 million Mexicans filed in, yet the film had to contend with the gravitational pull of a national football match and a broader World Cup season that the national film chamber had already flagged as a headwind. The picture was the weekend’s top draw, outpacing Steven Spielberg’s latest, but the numbers hinted at a maturing franchise facing a more distracted public.

Behind the scenes, the custodians of these legacy properties are grappling with how to justify another chapter. Tom Hanks, the voice of Woody, told Entertainment Weekly that he would only return for a sixth Toy Story if the story were “great, new and innovative” and not merely a corporate exercise. He also noted, with what he called a “scary” resignation, that Pixar could likely recreate his voice via artificial intelligence from decades of archived recordings. Meanwhile, an art book released after Toy Story 5’s premiere revealed a discarded ending: a physical reunion between Jessie and her now-adult original owner Emily, a scene storyboarded but ultimately replaced by a more indirect homage. Co-director McKenna Harris explained that the team felt the connection worked better when left to implication, a choice that speaks to the delicate calculus of satisfying long-time fans without resorting to easy sentiment.

As the southern hemisphere’s winter school holidays approach, the release calendar is thickening with familiar faces reimagined. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow arrives in Mexican and Argentine cinemas on 25 June, a day earlier than in the United States, carrying a markedly less luminous tone than its Superman predecessor. Based on the comic miniseries, the film presents a Kara Zor-El who is alcoholic, adrift, and driven by vengeance—a departure that earned enthusiastic notices at its London world premiere. In Colombia, Minions & Monsters will land on 1 July after pre-screenings, while Disney’s live-action Moana, with Dwayne Johnson reprising his demigod role, is slated for 9 July in Argentina. Further out, Spider-Man: Un Nuevo Día waits until 30 July, but its tale of a Peter Parker erased from all memory already hums with anticipation.

Across these titles, a pattern emerges: studios are betting that audiences will turn out for characters they have known for decades, but only if the stories offer a genuine twist—a silent-film homage, a darker Kryptonian, a toy’s unspoken legacy. The discarded storyboard of Jessie and Emily, a pencil sketch of a reunion that never made it to the screen, lingers as a quiet emblem of the season’s central tension: how much closure do we really want from the stories we refuse to outgrow?