Is There a Monsters, Inc. 2? Where to Stream It in the US, and How Old Boo Is

*This page contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you make a purchase through these links.

Nearly flawless. As entertainment, Monsters, Inc. barely puts a foot wrong. A company that powers a whole city on children’s screams is a different company by the time the credits roll, and that change runs along the same track as Sulley’s growing bond with Boo, so the setup, the payoffs and the ending all click shut together. And yet, asked whether it is my favorite Pixar film, I have to stop and think for a second. What fills that second gets its own section further down.

For anyone who searched their way here, the short answers first. There is no film called Monsters, Inc. 2. The continuation is the Disney+ series Monsters at Work, the prequel about Mike and Sulley’s college years is Monsters University, and in March 2026 Pixar was reported to have a third feature in early development, with no release date. The film never says how old Boo is. If you are unsure where to start, start with this one. The reasoning is in the watch-order section below.

📺 Where to Watch Monsters, Inc. (October 2026)

Service	Status	Notes
Disney+	Streaming	The prequel is on the same service
Amazon Prime Video	Rent / Buy	Prime membership does not cover it
Apple TV	Rent / Buy	Also on YouTube, Google Play, Fandango at Home
Hulu	Not available	Not in the Hulu library
Netflix	Not available	Not licensed to Netflix in the US

As of October 5, 2026, Disney+ is the only US subscription that includes Monsters, Inc. Everything else is pay-per-title. Hulu is the one that catches people out, since Disney owns it, but this film is not in its library. Licensing deals do change, so it is worth a quick look on Disney+ itself before you sign up for a single film.

👉 If you finish this one wanting a Pixar film that grabs you harder, Pete Docter directed Up eight years later. Its first ten minutes hand over the thing I found in short supply here.

🎬 Trailer

📖 Synopsis – No Spoilers

Monstropolis runs on screams. Its power company, Monsters, Inc., employs Scarers who step through children’s closet doors at night and come back with screams bottled as energy. The catch is that every monster in town is convinced human children are toxic. A single child’s sock clinging to a returning employee is enough to bring a hazmat squad running.

The top Scarer is Sulley, a huge blue-furred veteran, and his partner is Mike, a one-eyed green bundle of nerves and jokes. They are closing in on the all-time scare record, with Randall, a rival who can blend into any background, breathing down their necks. Then one evening, on a floor that should be empty, a door has been left in its station, and a small human girl wanders through it into the monster world. Sulley names her Boo, and the two of them try to get her home before the company, or the city, finds out.

🔁 Is There a Monsters, Inc. 2 or 3? Sequel, Prequel, Watch Order

No film called Monsters, Inc. 2 exists. The same world has one prequel film and one series that picks up after this film, and a third feature is now in development. Laid out:

Title	Released	Where it sits
Monsters University, film	June 21, 2013	Before this film, Mike with Sulley in college
Monsters, Inc., this film	November 2, 2001	The starting point
Monsters at Work, series	July 7, 2021 on Disney+	Picks up the day after this film ends
Monsters, Inc. 3, film	In development	No date announced

Monsters at Work follows the company as it is forced to remake itself after what happens at the end of this film, so it belongs after. Its lead is a new young hire. Mike and Sulley are in it, voiced in English by John Goodman and Billy Crystal again. Japan went the other way: neither comedian from the film dub came back, and the series recast both roles with professional voice actors. The third film surfaced in March 2026, in a Wall Street Journal profile of Pete Docter, now Pixar’s chief creative officer. Nothing about its story, director or release date has been announced.

So which first? My answer is that either works, but if you are torn, start with Monsters, Inc. Going in story order, from Monsters University, does pay off, since you arrive here already knowing how the partnership began. But this film is complete on its own. It is enough by itself to make you fond of Sulley and Mike, and once you are, going back to University to see how they met adds another layer. That is release order, and it is the order I would recommend.

🧒 How Old Is Boo? Her Name, and Who Voiced Her

The film never gives Boo’s age. She talks in fragments and runs on unsteady legs, and most viewers read her as about two or three. Her English voice is Mary Gibbs, the daughter of Pixar story artist Rob Gibbs. She was too young for scripted line readings to be realistic, so the crew recorded her at play, following her around the studio with a microphone, and built Boo’s reactions out of what they caught.

Boo is Sulley’s nickname for her, and her real name is never spoken in the film. Fans tend to call her Mary, after the girl who voiced her. No official film or series follows Boo after the ending; Monsters at Work stays on the monster side of the doors. Theories that a grown-up Boo turns up in another Pixar film circulate widely, but Pixar has never confirmed one.

One small thing from the Japanese dub. Boo’s word for Sulley, Kitty, became nyan-nyan in Japanese, which is the baby-talk word a Japanese toddler uses for a cat. For a two-year-old naming an enormous furry creature, it may be the better fit.

✨ What Makes It Special

A company built on screams finds something stronger

Everyone remembers a night when the closet door was open an inch too far. The film takes that memory and turns it inside out: on the other side of the closet, a monster is scaring you because it is his job. The premise alone wins half the battle. The truly clever part comes after. The company that harvests screams ends the film running on something else entirely, and making more power than before.

Spoiler warning: the next two paragraphs touch on how the ending works. If you have not seen the film, skip to the next heading.

The answer is children’s laughter, which turns out to be far stronger than a scream. The switch never feels pulled out of a hat, because the film puts the clue on screen well before the ending: when Boo laughs, the lights around her surge far brighter than they should. You take the hint without noticing it, and at the end everything connects. The relationship of scarer and scared becomes, quite literally, the way the company makes electricity. So the ending reads less as something neatly tied up and more as the story settling exactly where its own weight was carrying it.

Because of that groundwork, the second and third viewings are more fun than the first. This is the kind of film I want to keep rewatching with kids, and I think that comes from how solid the script is, before it comes from how cute the characters are.

Boo barely changes. Sulley does

When a lost child wanders into another world, the usual story has the child grow up a little and go home. Boo hardly changes at all. She runs, laughs, hides, and wrecks every careful plan the monsters make. The one who changes is Sulley, the star Scarer, who bit by bit turns into the one who protects her. His job is to treat human children as a hazard. Put the best man at that job in front of a small child, make him choose the job’s logic or the girl, and you have the whole engine of the film. His choices pile up, and the ending is where they land.

Boo seems to carry a loneliness of her own that she has no words for. Alone in her room at night, she welcomed a huge furry stranger from the closet without a trace of fear, and that may have rescued more than just the monsters. From where I sit in Japan, a giant gentle creature quietly adopted by a very small girl calls up one picture before any other, and it is My Neighbor Totoro.

The door vault is a roller coaster

The climax happens in a vast vault where countless closet doors ride along overhead rails. Sulley, Mike and Boo leap onto passing doors, hop from one to the next, and duck through doors into the human world as shortcuts to shake off their pursuer. This scene gets me every single time. It is a space only animation could build, and in 2001 it already plays this well. Small jokes ride along with it, too: one escape route runs through a Japanese building with Mount Fuji framed in the window, a gag that lands a little differently when you watch it from here.

Japan liked the premise enough to build a ride on it. Tokyo Disneyland opened Monsters, Inc. Ride & Go Seek! in April 2009, a game of flashlight hide-and-seek through the factory, and it exists only in Tokyo.

Sulley and Mike are fun just talking

Big, mild Sulley and quick, motor-mouthed Mike. Their easy back-and-forth keeps the whole film light. In Japan the pair were dubbed by two comedians rather than voice actors: Hidehiko Ishizuka, one half of the duo Honjamaka and a fixture of Japanese TV food shows, as Sulley, and Yuji Tanaka of the duo Bakusho Mondai as Mike. On paper it should not work. A few minutes in, you cannot imagine those characters sounding any other way. The small gags never let up either, like Mike’s face getting covered by the company logo in his own TV commercial, and the running joke that the monsters are more childish than the child.

🎭 Memorable Scenes

Kitty!

1. Boo sees Sulley at work

During a scare demonstration, Boo watches the creature she has been calling Kitty roar in full professional mode. The way she backs away from him, and the look on Sulley’s face when he realizes what she just saw, takes maybe thirty seconds. Those seconds decide the whole second half. The Sulley who does the job and the Sulley who is with Boo collide right there.

2. The door vault

Watch this one less as plot and more as a ride. You end up tracking where the next door will swing in from, right along with the characters. It is the same rush as the last stretch of a line for a theme park attraction.

3. The goodbye

How Sulley and Boo part stays out of this review. Just make sure you see the expression on Sulley’s face after the door closes. A lot of people say they cry at this point every time they watch, and I understand why.

💭 How It Made Me Feel

What stays with me is less a big emotional blow than the satisfaction of watching something well made land cleanly. The setups pay off, the relationships arrive where they need to, and in theaters the end credits even ran a reel of mock outtakes, as if the monsters had been acting all along. Ninety-two minutes with nothing left on the table.

Next time, I want to watch for where each clue was planted. (I am aware that my main complaint about a near-perfect film is going to be that it does not knock the wind out of me often enough.)

👉 It streams on Disney+ in the US.

😅 Where It Falls Short

But here is where I have to be honest about why I cannot call it my number one without hesitating.

Few scenes that stop you cold

Pixar’s WALL-E has a scene where a trash-compacting robot sits alone, watching an old tape of the musical Hello, Dolly! A machine that cannot speak, and barely has a face, comes alive right there. Monsters, Inc. does not have many moments of that kind, where you cannot pull your eyes off the screen. It carries you on laughs and pace all the way to the end, and the price is that quiet moments, the ones where you forget your hands, are rare.

That is a matter of taste more than a flaw. Plenty of kids grew up watching this film over and over, and the pace is one of its real strengths. My own taste just sits slightly off to one side of it.

A small question about how things work afterward

Mild spoiler. Even after the company changes the way it does business, monsters still come out of children’s closets in the middle of the night. Think about it squarely and it snags for a moment. It is small enough to let slide in the warmth of the ending, but the world-building is good enough elsewhere that the people who notice will notice.

The 2001 CG shows its age

Sulley’s fur still impresses, but surfaces and the way light falls on things give away a film from 25 years ago. The palette is loud as well, and scenes crowded with brightly colored monsters can tire some eyes. Coming straight from recent Pixar, you will have to make allowances.

📺 Streaming Guide by Service

Is Monsters, Inc. on Netflix? No, Disney+ is the only subscription

Netflix does not have it in the US, and neither does Hulu. Disney+ is the only subscription that includes it. Monsters University and the Monsters at Work series are on Disney+ too, so if you plan to follow the order above, keeping everything on one service is the least hassle.

If you only want this one film, renting it on Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV does the job. A Prime membership does not cover it, so expect a per-title charge on either.

🎬 If You Loved Monsters, Inc., Watch These 3 Next

WALL-E

Directed by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote the Monsters, Inc. screenplay and executive-produced it. This is the film full of what I said Monsters, Inc. is short on: scenes that hold you without a word of dialogue. A robot left alone on an emptied Earth keeps tidying the garbage, and longs for the hand-holding he saw in an old musical. On that premise alone, the opening stretch runs with almost no talking. If you love the pace of Monsters, Inc., try this as its opposite speed.

👉 Read the WALL-E review

The Nightmare Before Christmas

In Halloween Town, where scaring people is the whole point of life, Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, stumbles into Christmas Town and falls for it completely. He sets out to deliver Christmas his own way, and the fun is watching what happens when a master scarer takes on a job meant to delight. It heads in the same direction as Monsters, Inc., from scaring to something else, and trips in the exact opposite way. Henry Selick directed it in stop-motion from Tim Burton’s story, and it works as a musical too. It also streams on Disney+ in the US. The trailer above is Disney Japan’s official one for the 4K release, since we could not find an official English upload.

The Iron Giant

A giant robot falls out of the sky near a small town, and a boy named Hogarth finds it. The adults hunt it as a threat, but through its time with the boy, the robot tries to decide for itself what it is going to be. A big, feared creature becoming a protector because of one small child is the same line Sulley and Boo walk. This one walks it without leaning on laughs, and stays quiet all the way. It was Brad Bird’s first feature as director, in 1999. The trailer above is Warner Bros.’ own, from the Signature Edition re-release.

📝 Final Thoughts

Monsters, Inc. builds an entire company story out of the relationship of scarer and scared, then rides the change in that relationship all the way to the ending. Setups that pay off, the door vault, the banter of Sulley and Mike. In Japan it opened four months after the US, took ¥9.37 billion, and has stayed loved for more than two decades since. Cute characters alone do not explain that. Those three things together do.

Even so, I wanted a few more moments that steal your breath and leave you unable to move. That is taste, and it takes nothing away from what the film is worth. This is one to watch with kids, again and again. And if you want more of these two afterward, go back to Monsters University and see how they became partners in the first place.

⭐ The Film at a Glance

Category	Rating	Note
Story	★★★★★	Clues planted early, every one paid off
Animation	★★★★☆	The door vault still thrills, surfaces show 2001
Music	★★★★☆	Big-band swing plus an Oscar-winning song
Characters	★★★★★	Sulley, Mike, Boo: all three carry the film
Tearjerker	★★★☆☆	The goodbye gets a lot of people
Family Viewing	★★★★★	Rated G, the monsters are not scary