Fan Theory: The Missed Meteor Kicks Off the Entire Pixar Timeline
What's There
The film's opening premise is that the asteroid which caused the real-world dinosaur extinction event misses Earth, allowing dinosaurs to keep evolving for millions of years instead of going extinct.
Why It Matters
"The Pixar Theory" uses this premise as the starting point of its entire proposed shared timeline — with dinosaurs (and eventually other animals and objects) evolving toward human-like intelligence over millions of years, setting up everything from Brave's Witch to Cars' human-free future. It's a natural anchor point since the film is explicitly set 65+ million years in the past, chronologically earlier than any other Pixar film — but the film itself makes no claim about connecting to other Pixar movies. The "one shared timeline" framing is entirely the fan theory's construction, applied after the fact to a film that stands alone in its own story.