When Toy Story finally came out on November 22, it exceeded all the hopes that Pixar and Disney had put into it. It made $28 million in the Thanksgiving 3-day weekend alone, and eventually reached $160 million in US box-office receipts — a great number for a $27 million production.
When Steve started envisioning the possible success of Toy Story, he talked about taking Pixar public. Wall Street analysts and experts laughed at his face, since Pixar still hadn’t made a single profit during its nine-year existence. But, in August 1995, a small startup that had existed for only a year and was also unprofitable had made a huge hit by going public: it was Netscape, the software developer of the eponymous Web browser. Suddenly Steve’s idea was not that ridiculous anymore.