10 Huge Movie Box Office Hits NOBODY Saw Coming

Silly though it might sound in retrospect, the release of Toy Story was nervously anticipated by many inside Disney, given that there was no guarantee audiences at large would connect with an entirely computer-generated animated film.

But Pixar's feature debut became an overnight pop-culture monolith, girded by its groundbreaking 3D animation, incredible premise and script, and of course the note-perfect performances from the ensemble voice cast.

Though Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who served as an executive producer on the project, considered that $75 million worldwide would make it a modest hit, Toy Story blew past all expectations and finished at $365 million. This made it the second-highest-grossing film of 1995, sitting less than a million behind Die Hard with a Vengeance and beating out the decidedly more-hyped likes of GoldenEye, Pocahontas, Batman Forever, Apollo 13, Casper, and Waterworld.

From there, the series' legacy barely even needs to be stated, with the four Toy Story films and spin-off Lightyear having collected a total of $3.27 billion in ticket receipts.