Josh Cooley, the Toy Story 4 director the studios keep handing toys

Josh Cooley

Photo: Festival Annecy/K. Pauli / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 23, 1979 Berkeley, California, United States
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Toy Story 4, Transformers One, Riley's First Date?
Awards	Academy Award · Annie

Josh Cooley has directed two feature films, and both grew out of a toy line. The first, Toy Story 4, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The second, Transformers One, drew some of the warmest reviews the robots have ever had and then struggled to fill cinemas. The next one Universal wants from him is a Lego film, with Keanu Reeves negotiating for the lead. For a filmmaker who first made his name writing the emotional wiring of an eleven-year-old girl in Inside Out, the toy box has turned into a calling card he has not yet managed to put down.

A native of Berkeley, California, Cooley came into Pixar as an intern, recruited by Joe Ranft, the head of story who had helped write the original Toy Story. He spent the following years in the story department, the room where a Pixar film is drawn panel by panel long before anything is animated, boarding sequences for Ratatouille and Up and contributing additional boards to Cars. On Up he also found his way into the cast, voicing Omega, one of the talking dogs in Charles Muntz’s pack.

That film gave him his first credit as a director. George and A.J., a short he wrote and directed in 2009, follows the two retirement-home nurses who arrive to collect Carl Fredricksen on the morning his house lifts off, and stays with them once the house is gone. It was a story artist’s idea of a film: one small sideways glance at a bigger one.

The bigger break was Inside Out. Cooley served as story supervisor and wrote the screenplay with Pete Docter and Meg LeFauve, and the script brought the three of them, together with co-director Ronnie del Carmen, an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. It also won the Annie Award for writing in a feature. He voiced Jangles, the birthday clown who haunts Riley’s subconscious, and wrote and directed Riley’s First Date?, the short that moved the film’s emotions into the heads of her parents for one excruciating doorstep conversation.

John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton then brought him onto Toy Story 4 as co-director, and he ended up as its sole director, making his feature debut on the series that built the studio. The exposure was obvious. Toy Story 3 had closed with Andy handing his toys to Bonnie, an ending that looked like the last word on Woody. Cooley later told Deadline that the first screenings of the new film “felt very Toy Story, in the sense of, ‘These are the characters we know.’ It didn’t feel new.” His fix was to throw a wrench into what audiences expected. He found it in Forky, a spork with pipe-cleaner arms who forces Woody to explain what a toy is for, and in a returned Bo Peep who has learned to live without a child at all. Reeves arrived as Duke Caboom, a Canadian stunt motorcyclist with crippling self-doubt. The film passed a billion dollars worldwide and took the Oscar.

“I thought I knew what [directing] was like, just being around directors a lot and working with them,” he said afterwards, describing the move from the story room to the chair, “but once you’re in the driver’s seat making decisions, it’s a completely different experience.”

The harder test came after he left Pixar in March 2020. Within months he had signed to write and direct Malamander, a live-action adaptation of Thomas Taylor’s children’s novel for Sony, and Little Monsters, a hybrid film built on Universal’s classic monsters. A year later Disney hired him to write Tower of Terror, with Scarlett Johansson attached to star and produce. More than five years on, all three remain in development. The film that did get made shows the bind most clearly. Paramount gave him the first fully computer-animated Transformers feature, an origin story set on Cybertron in which Optimus Prime and Megatron begin as friends, voiced by Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. Critics were generous and opening-weekend audiences handed it an A CinemaScore, yet Transformers One opened to about $26 million in North America in September 2024, below forecasts, and finished near $129 million worldwide against a reported production budget of $75 million. Cooley had made the best-reviewed Transformers film in years, and on the industry ledger it still read as a disappointment.

What that leaves is a director whose reputation rests on doing something unexpected with a property the audience already owns, and a résumé that makes him the first call when a studio has one.

The calls have kept coming. In June 2025 Paramount Animation and Ryan Reynolds‘ Maximum Effort set him to adapt, and possibly direct, I Eat Poop: A Dung Beetle Story, Mark Pett’s picture book about a beetle hiding his diet at a new school. That October, Miramax paid seven figures for London Ghost Tour, an original pitch by screenwriter Terry Rossio, with Cooley attached to direct; the comparisons on the table were Night at the Museum and An American Werewolf in London, and the plan is a three-film arc. In June 2026 Deadline reported that Reeves was negotiating to star in a live-action and animation hybrid Lego film at Universal, with Cooley directing, on a tight clock: the studio’s rights to the brand could lapse if no film neared pre-production within six months. In September he signed with 20th Century Studios to write 99 Nights in the Forest, an adaptation of the Roblox survival game, with Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert producing.

None of those films has a release date. The Lego project has a deadline built into it and would reunite him with the actor who played his stunt rider. London Ghost Tour would hand him a story that nobody first bought at a toy fair. Whichever reaches a camera first will settle what kind of director Hollywood has decided Josh Cooley is.

Featured Films

Tags: animation, Keanu Reeves, Inside Out, Josh Cooley, Transformers One, Pete Docter

Related People

Jordan Peele

Laurie Metcalf

Lorenzo di Bonaventura

Duncan Jones

Josh Safdie

José Coronado