It was supposed to be the big box office Pixar release of the US summer, but the legendary animation outfit’s latest release, Elio, has shocked box office observers and industry experts with a dead-in-the-water $34.9m global opening weekend — the worst in Pixar’s history. With a budget of $150m, Elio, an original story about an orphaned boy looking for love and family, and desperate to be beamed into outer space by aliens, seems to be the kind of quirky family fare that Pixar has relied on for box office domination. But something just isn’t clicking for its target audience.
That’s not just a Pixar problem. BBC critic Nicholas Barber said in a recent article that this was a symptom of a larger trend in the world of children and family entertainment where audiences are more receptive to content they’re familiar with than new ideas.
Last year Pixar made a killing at the box office with its much-anticipated sequel Inside Out 2, which amassed $1.7bn worldwide. Other films targeting similar audiences like Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog also did big business, accounting for takings of $6.85bn between them. What all 2024’s big-profit films for younger and family audiences had in common was that they were all based on pre-existing intellectual property (IP). They did not reinvent as much as they mined nostalgia for their profits. That trend has continued this year, with the success of the film based on the smash hit game Minecraft and the live-action remakes of the early 2000s Disney animation Lilo & Stitch and the DreamWorks animation How to Train Your Dragon, all of which are raking in big bucks at the box office.
The summer’s supposed big-budget action entry, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, has failed to recoup the $400m budget and $100m marketing campaign costs at the box office. When it comes to younger-audience films this year, unoriginal is a far safer bet than new ideas. This could mean, as Barber observes, that “the days of such franchise-starting phenomena as The Lion King, Toy Story and Frozen are over”. A recent article in The New York Times Magazine by Brooks Barnes seemed to add credence to this. Barnes argued that recent animated features like Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken, Migration, Wish and Onwards had all failed dismally at the box office, while critically acclaimed Pixar films Soul and Turning Red skipped theatres and went straight to video-on-demand services.
So, what’s to blame for this change? As with much in recent mainstream movie trends, some of the blame can be placed on the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on movie watching habits and audience preferences. But Barber says these are only part of the story. A more significant factor influencing the trend towards preferring the same old to new stories may be the dearth of exciting narratives to grab the already over-subscribed attention of this demographic.
That is sometimes compounded by the Catch-22 environment of the current movie release environment: original stories have been failing at the box office, so studios are nervous about allowing writers and directors to spend millions of dollars producing untested and unknown original content. That often results in an excess of nervous over-supervision and second-guessing where studios change director mid-production, send scripts to too many writers for notes and additions, and create new messier problems that complicate the production. Animation is expensive and studios are less inclined to leave it up to artists, whose visions may not strike a chord with audiences at the box office.
In the case of Elio, the film was originally intended to be directed by Adrian Molina, whose own childhood on a military base inspired much of the film’s plot and setting, but Molina was replaced last year by Turning Red director June Domee, who was then assigned a new co-director, Madeline Sharafian. This meant that a personal project became a Pixar product to be steered by two directors, with no personal experience of the story.
The problem of too many cooks spoiling animated broths isn’t unique to Elio — many recent releases in the genre have been characterised by crowded story credits and multiple directors, whose differing ideas have resulted in final films that suffer from convoluted plotting and uneven execution.
The only way to save one of mainstream cinema’s last frontiers of imagination and originality is to allow it the freedom it had 30 years ago. The alternative could be a new reality where animated films are mostly just new versions of previous animated films and existing IP.
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