Meryl Streep Is Officially In The Pixar Movie Hoppers, But I Was Caught Off Guard By Who She’s Playing

As a bunch of huge 2025 movie releases come out in the next week, a lot of new trailers are being dropped, and the latest is from Pixar. After the first look at Toy Story 5 came out last week, we now have a new trailer for Hoppers, and word that none other than Meryl Streep is part of the cast.

When you watch the trailer above, you might theorize immediately and say Meryl Streep has to be playing the gray-haired scientist, like I did, but that's not the case. The actress is actually lending her voice to a character called "Insect Queen." Here's a first look from the two-minute trailer:

Insect Queen (voiced by Meryl Streep) in Hoppers

(Image credit: Pixar)

When I watched the trailer, I thought Meryl Streep would be the character of Dr. Sam, who is the professor of the lead character Mabel, but that role is actually voiced by Hocus Pocus' actress Kathy Najimy. Obviously, Meryl Streep has proved she can do just about anything as an actress, so it's kind of on brand that she is playing something as random as a monarch butterfly.

Dr. Sam in Hoppers

(Image credit: Pixar)

The movie is one of two roles Streep has lined up for 2026, given she's also set to reprise her role as Miranda Priestley in The Devil Wears Prada 2. (The first trailer for that just came out, too!)

Prior, we had known that the Hoppers movie cast would include Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan and Piper Curda as the movie's protagonist, Mabel, but now word of Meryl Streep's addition to the cast is one of many reveals. Disney and Pixar also shared that Dave Franco, Stranger Things' Eduardo Franco, Sam Richardson, and SNL actors Melissa Villaseñor, Ego Nwodim, and Vanessa Bayer are also among the cast.

Hoppers is about a group of scientists who invent a way to "hop" human minds into lifelike robotic animal bodies that can understand the animal world. When a 19-year-old named Mabel learns of this tech from her professor, she decides to use it to embody a robotic beaver and help the animals defend themselves against a construction company's plot.

The movie comes from director Daniel Chong, who is the creator of Cartoon Network's We Bare Bears and has served on the senior creative team for just about every recent Pixar movie since Turning Red. The movie has been in development since 2020 and is officially set to be released in theaters next spring.

Hoppers will be the first Pixar movie since Elio, which famously bombed at the box office over the summer, as it made $154 million worldwide against a reported $150 million production budget. Could Hoppers be the latest one of Pixar's movies to be a success? We'll see when it comes out on March 6. The trailer certainly looks promising, and Streep's involvement is great news!

Sarah El-Mahmoud
Staff Writer

Sarah El-Mahmoud has been with CinemaBlend since 2018 after graduating from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in Journalism. In college, she was the Managing Editor of the award-winning college paper, The Daily Titan, where she specialized in writing/editing long-form features, profiles and arts & entertainment coverage, including her first run-in with movie reporting, with a phone interview with Guillermo del Toro for Best Picture winner, The Shape of Water. Now she's into covering YA television and movies, and plenty of horror. Word webslinger. All her writing should be read in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 voice over.

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