June 17th is Pixar Sequel Day

I knew there had to be a reason I have a Microsoft Word document in which I record a running list of what movies I've seen on each day of the calendar year.

I don't mean just a list of movies watched. I mean a list that starts with January 1, and has next to it the movies I've seen on January 1, dating back to 2002, with the year I saw them in parenthesis afterward. And then goes on from there throughout the rest of the year.

Without that, I would have never noticed that I've seen a Pixar movie on June 17th, three years running. And not just a Pixar movie. A Pixar sequel.

In 2017, it was Cars 3. In 2018, it was Incredibles 2. Now 2019 has rolled along and I am among the first to have seen Toy Story 4.

What makes this especially strange is that you usually only go to the movies on particular days of the week, especially when you go with your kids, which I did for each of these. So if you've seen a kids movie, any kids movie, three years running, one of those days has to be either a Friday or a Monday. Unless you've got a leap year factored in, in which case a Tuesday or a Thursday is also a possibility.

No leap years here. I watched these movies on a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday, all June 17th in consecutive years.

A lot of things had to go just right for that to happen.

The first year, they had to schedule the Cars 3 preview screening for a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. My family and I went to that for free so I could review it. The movie opened that Thursday, June 22nd.

Incredibles 2 opened a week earlier than that in 2018, on June 14th, but for this to work out I had to not get invited to a critics screening of that. I can't remember why I didn't. My editor might have flubbed something. I had to instead take my kids that Sunday, on what was a really rainy day if I remember correctly.

But the strangest turn of events had to be this year, when for some reason the advanced screening of Toy Story 4 was not on a weekend at all. When I saw it was scheduled for a Monday, I thought I couldn't go, since some of these screenings are planned for weekday mornings or afternoons. But then I noticed it was set to start at 6, and realized that not only could I go, but the rest of the family could as well. We all went even though it was a school night, because the alternative was to shell out more than $50 for their three non-free tickets this weekend.

The streak of Pixar sequels on June 17th will die here, as the next Pixar movie, Onward, a) is not a sequel, and b) comes out next March. I suppose I could end up watching it with my kids on video in June, but that seems unlikely.

Given that the original Toy Story is in my top ten films of all time, and the sequel was my #2 movie of 1999 (I didn't yet keep rankings when the original came out, but it would have been my #1), I probably should be writing a Toy Story 4 post that doesn't exist just to point out a coincidence. Maybe in the coming days I will. But my review will also post in a day or two, or may have already by the time you read this (check for the link to your right).

I'll save my soapboxing about why the series did not stop at three (but that I liked the movie anyway) for that forum.