This was a rough summer at the box office, with several notable bombs and unexpected underperformers. Once sure bets are now no longer guaranteed to even make their budgets back, as evidenced by the shrugs that greeted "Thunderbolts" and "Fantastic Four." However, today I want to talk about "Elio," the latest PIXAR film. New PIXAR films used to be a license to print money, and their sequels to past hits like "Inside Out 2" can still be blockbusters. "Elio," however, despite being well reviewed, and despite being made for the underserved family audience, had the lowest opening for any PIXAR film, not counting the pandemic era releases.
We can parse this in many ways. First, all films that aren't part of a franchise or based on existing IP have been a much tougher sell in recent years. However, animated family films tend to have much stronger legs, and aren't so dependent on their opening weekends. After "Elemental" started soft, with an opening weekend total not much higher than Elio's, it managed a respectable tenth place at the 2023 domestic summer box office, right between "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" and "Fast X." I fully expect that "Elio" is going to perform in a similar way, especially since the reviews have been good.
However, there's no getting away from the fact that the cultural cachet of PIXAR films has been significantly eroded. Many blame the pandemic, where Disney decided to skip theatrical releases for three original PIXAR films - "Soul," "Turning Red," and "Luca," - and premiere them on the Disney+ streaming service instead. However, things may have already been on a downswing. "Onward," which hit theaters in March of 2020, only had a partial release because of lockdowns, but its opening weekend was one of the lowest for a PIXAR film at that time. Some blame the flood of sequels that outnumbered the original PIXAR films in the 2010s or the departure of John Lasseter in 2018. Some blame changing audience tastes and expectations.
Because I'm an animation nerd, I can't help drawing parallels to Disney animation. PIXAR has been in the business of making movies for a little over thirty years. Its first feature, "Toy Story," was released in 1995. When the Disney animation studios were at the same point in their history, thirty years after "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," it was 1967. "The Jungle Book" was enjoying massive box office success, but Walt Disney had just died, and the studio was about to enter a twenty year period of decline and obscurity before its Renaissance. They nearly closed down for good in the 1980s. During this era, the original artists who were the backbone of the studio were retiring, and there was a sense of cheapness and artistic stagnation around the projects that were being produced.
There are many differences between the two studios, of course, but the one thing I keep coming back to is that PIXAR, like Disney, was a storied pioneer of a particular form of animation, and set the standard for what animated films could be for a very long time. Though PIXAR always had competitors from the beginning, their movies just looked and sounded and played better than what came out of Dreamworks or Illumination or Blue Sky. The level of quality was dependably higher, the films more polished, and the talent involved more impressive. That's changed over time, and now PIXAR often feels like it's a few steps behind, relying on its old characters and too much nostalgia.
Probably no bigger indicator of the trouble PIXAR is in is the changed attitude toward its familiar house style. "The PIXAR style" used to be the default for CGI, what everyone else was trying to look like. After "Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse," now the 2D/3D hybrid styles are becoming more popular, and a film like "Elio" starts looking safe and old hat. The big animated hit of the summer was Sony and Netflix's "KPop Demon Hunters," a streaming release that nobody saw coming. We're far from PIXAR reaching any kind of artistic or economic nadir, but after thirty years, it also feels like the studio is overdue for a change - culturally, artistically, and maybe in other ways too. "Luca" director Enrico Casarosa has an upcoming feature that could be the beginning of this. "Gatto," due in summer of 2027, will be PIXAR's first "hand-painted" animated film.
Change is not easy, however. Again, it took Disney twenty years to get out of the wilderness, and their transition from traditional to CGI animation a decade later was also a rough one. Everyone loves "Tangled" and "Frozen," but forgets that "Dinosaur," "Bolt," "Chicken Little," and "Meet the Robinsons" preceded them. What's really interesting this time around is that there's a high likelihood that we're going to see both PIXAR and Disney Animation go through their next transitional phases simultaneously. After the recent flops of "Strange World" and "Wish," Disney's in just as bad a position as PIXAR right now with its originals.
But if history tells us anything, they'll be back on top again soon enough.
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