The Wrap is reporting that Oscar winner Patricia Arquette is in talks to star in the next Toy Story movie, alongside returning stars Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, and Annie Potts. Not much is known about Arquette’s character so far, except that she’ll be a new addition to the franchise, and that she’ll be playing a “laid-back mom” who’s also “a hippie.”
The announcement raises so many questions, some of them deeply philosophical. Is Arquette playing a toy? And if so, what does her character’s free-love fecundity mean for writers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s vision of the biological realities of the life of a sentient plaything? Will this self-described “love story” finally get into the nitty-gritty details of toy-on-toy reproduction, coyly hinted at for so long by the plug-and-play biology of the Potato Head family? Will she (or her toy partner) be humanoid, and what will it say for their resulting offspring? Or will Arquette just be playing a regular old human mom, leaving the writhing cauldron of synthetic-genetic secrets hiding beneath Woody’s dapper cowboy duds to remain a tantalizing unknown? (Probably that last one, is our guess, but we’ll known more when co-directors John Lasseter and Josh Cooley bring Toy Story 4 to theaters in June of 2017.)