'Toy Story 4' coming from Pixar in June 2017 (update)

Pixar is working on a fourth Toy Story film, announced Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, during an earnings call today.

Toy Story 4 will be directed by John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. It is set to hit theaters in June 2017, reports Ben Fritz of the Wall Street Journal.

The most recent Toy Story film, Toy Story 3 (image above), premiered in June 2010. The original Toy Story was released in 1995, and its sequel, Toy Story 2, came out in 1999; Lasseter directed both of them, while the third film was directed by Lee Unkrich. The next entry in the Toy Story franchise is the television short film Toy Story That Time Forgot, a 22-minute Christmas special directed by Sam and Max creator Steve Purcell, which will air Dec. 2 on ABC.

Update: Toy Story 4's specific release date is June 16, 2017, Disney announced on its Oh My Disney blog. The script is being co-written by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, both of whom also wrote 2012's Celeste and Jesse Forever. According to Oh My Disney, Toy Story 4 will "bring Buzz, Woody, and the rest of the toys back to the big screen."

Update 2: In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lasseter said Toy Story 4 will be a love story that will begin where Toy Story 3 ended, with Andy handing off his beloved toys to a young girl, Bonnie, as he headed off to college.

Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, director of WALL-E and a co-writer on all three Toy Story movies, wrote a treatment for Toy Story 4 over the past two years, and then brought in Jones and McCormack to write the script. "I wanted to get a strong female voice in the writing of this," said Lasseter, regarding the hiring of Jones.

"We only make sequels when we have a story that's as good as or better than the original. We don't just, because of the success of a film, automatically say we're going to do a sequel and then figure out what we're going to do," said Lasseter.