Tom Hanks said advances in artificial intelligence could enable studios to recreate his voice in future Toy Story sequels without his active participation, describing the prospect as “a scary thought”.
Hanks has voiced the cowboy doll Woody since the first Toy Story was released in 1995 and is reprising his role in Toy Story 5. The film centres on the toys confronting a new threat to playtime as Bonnie becomes increasingly attached to a tablet-like device called Lilypad, reflecting what Pixar has described as a “Toy meets Tech” story.
On the character’s long-term future in an industry increasingly grappling with AI-generated content, Hanks told Entertainment Weekly: “Time is undefeated. 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.”
Co-star Tim Allen, who voices Buzz Lightyear, agreed.
Both stars described the possibility of AI-generated performances continuing the franchise without them as “a scary thought”.
Toy Story 5 opened in theatres on 19 June with an estimated $160m in domestic ticket sales, easily surpassing the previous series-best debut of $120m set by Toy Story 4 in 2019.
Internationally, it made $152m over the opening weekend to make a formidable worldwide total of $312m.
The film’s commercial success has already led to speculation about whether Pixar could greenlight a sixth film, but Hanks said the 31-year-old franchise would need to justify itself creatively.
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“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,” Hanks said.
“I mean, it is a huge corporate business without a doubt, I’m not gonna discount that. But unless it’s good, new, fresh, there’s no reason to do it at all.”
Earlier this month, Hanks revealed that more than AI, he feared that cinemagoers could stop caring whether what they were watching was an authentic human performance and creation.
“Here’s what I worry about: that there will be something that will be blatantly AI — created, imagined, produced, the whole bit — and the audience won’t care that it’s AI,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle. “They’ll just say, ‘Well, it’s AI, but you know, I still watched it.’ There is a certain type of human element that is required in the contract between the audience and the filmmakers, and if one side of that doesn’t care about that contract.”
In 2023, Hanks warned that advances in AI and deepfake technology meant death might no longer mark the end of an actor’s screen career.
“The first time we did a movie that had a huge amount of our own data locked in a computer — literally what we looked like — was a movie called The Polar Express,” Hanks said on The Adam Buxton Podcast , referring to director Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture animated film.
“We saw this coming, we saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones from inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. That has only grown a billion-fold since then and we see it everywhere.”
He added: “Anybody can now recreate themselves at any age they are by way of AI or deepfake technology. I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and that’s it, but performances can go on and on and on and on.”
Months later, Hanks said those concerns became personal when an AI-generated version of his likeness was used without his permission in an advertisement for a dental plan.
In October 2023, the actor warned fans on Instagram about the fake advert, writing: “Beware!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
However, he starred alongside Robin Wright in Here, director Robert Zemeckis’s experimental drama that used AI-powered de-ageing tools to make Hanks and Wright appear several decades younger in parts of the film. The 2024 film is based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, and takes place entirely in one living room over 100 years.
At the time, Hanks praised the tech for doing the work of half a year “in a nanosecond”. “We knew that this supercomputer was going to do all the work of six months of postproduction in a nanosecond,” he told Radio Times. “So we shot the scenes at Pinewood and we could look at them immediately.”
