Tom Hanks turned the red carpet at Tuesday’s Toy Story 5 Los Angeles premiere into an impromptu advice column, telling E! News he had just shared a four-decade-tested marriage rule with Taylor Swift for her use with fiance Travis Kelce. The Hanks line, delivered as the actor passed the photo wall on his way to the El Capitan Theatre, has been the most-quoted moment of the premiere all week.
“The man must make the waffles on Sunday,” Hanks said, repeating what he had just told Swift. The Toy Story 5 voice cast member, who has been married to actress and producer Rita Wilson for 38 years, has been a reliable late-stage source of folksy press-quotes for more than two decades, but the waffles line has landed differently because of its specific Swift-Kelce framing.
E! News, which recorded the on-camera exchange, reported Hanks was on the red carpet for roughly 12 minutes, and that Swift attended without Kelce. The Kansas City Chiefs tight end was in Texas for early WNBA finals coverage, with the Swift-Spielberg-Songwriters-Hall-of-Fame moment, which our coverage unpacked Friday, happening three days after the Toy Story 5 premiere.
Swift had a direct stake in the Toy Story 5 premiere beyond the Pixar-fan social circuit. She contributed an original song for the character Jessie that dropped June 5 alongside the soundtrack album, and the film’s Pixar producer Andrew Stanton has framed her involvement as a deliberate continuation of the Sheryl Crow-and-Pharrell-era Toy Story musical tradition. People reported the singer attended the premiere with her mother Andrea and her brother Austin, and that the Hanks exchange happened on the photo wall as Swift was finishing her press queue.
Hanks’s track record on marriage-and-relationship public-comment has been one of the more consistent veteran-actor branding plays of the past decade. He has used the same Tony Bennett-style press-friendly approach since the late 1990s, with one-liners on long-term partnership running through every major Toy Story press cycle, the Sully promotional tour, and the 2024 Here junket. The waffles rule, by his own reading, came from his Rita Wilson breakfast routine over the past 25 years.
Toy Story 5 itself opens nationwide June 19, 2026 on roughly 4,200 domestic screens. The film, directed by Andrew Stanton from a script he co-wrote with Will McCormack, has been tracking for a $135 million opening weekend, by Variety’s box-office desk. The premiere drew an unusually thick A-list crowd, with Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Annie Potts, Wallace Shawn and Tony Hale all attending. Hanks, Pixar’s longest-tenured voice-talent partner, was the only voice-cast attendee to make the marriage-advice press loop.
Disney’s broader summer 2026 slate is now visibly arranged around Toy Story 5 and the Marvel Animation X-Men ’97 Season 2 premiere on July 1, which our preview mapped. Marvel’s Iron Man and His Awesome Friends added 11 new episodes Friday, per our coverage of the drop, and Disney’s Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, with Awkwafina joining the cast, is dated for July, per our reporting.
Hanks’s Swift moment has, predictably, taken over the post-premiere social-media weather report. The waffles rule trended through Wednesday morning on TikTok, with Kelce’s New Heights podcast co-host Jason Kelce posting a clip in which he laughs at the rule. Hanks has not been asked to elaborate further, and his publicist did not respond to a follow-up request for additional context. The Toy Story 5 audience-side rollout begins this weekend.
