Elemental, my dear Watson
Pixar's latest movie has gone from a dud to a lukewarm success story. What does it mean?
When Pixar’s “Elemental” arrived in theaters in June, it looked like another flop for the storied animation studio.
It earned just $29 million at the US box office in its opening weekend, the worst debut for a Pixar movie since its first release, “Toy Story,” nearly three decades ago. That kind of start for a big-budget film typically means it’s dead on arrival.
It followed last year’s flop, “Lightyear,” which only grossed $226 million worldwide after a $50 million domestic opening. Surely, if a “Toy Story” spinoff, even one as confusingly marketed as “Lightyear,” couldn’t become a hit, then “Elemental” had no chance, right?
Well, after two months of playing exclusively in theaters, “Elemental” has earned $443 million globally, nearly twice as much as “Lightyear” made in ticket sales. It’s still far from the billion-dollar highs of pre-pandemic releases like “Toy Story 4” and “Incredibles 2,” or even other Pixar originals like “Inside Out” ($849 million worldwide) and “Coco” ($814 million), but it’s a step in the right direction. And it provides some potential lessons for Disney and the rest of Hollywood.
The Good News: Movies can have legs if studios let them
“Elemental,” after enjoying an extended stay in theaters, is set to debut on VOD platforms this week, and there still isn’t a Disney+ release date. This used to be the norm: a movie would get an exclusive window in theaters for a few months, then a window on VOD and home entertainment. The pandemic, and the surge in streaming services, changed that, particularly for Pixar. Assuming you reading this were one of the many people who did not see “Lightyear” in a movie theater, you probably haven’t seen any Pixar movie in a theater since at least 2019.
That’s because Pixar’s pandemic-era movies — “Luca,” “Soul,” and “Turning Red” — went straight to Disney+. “Lightyear” was supposed to be the studio’s big theatrical comeback, but it flopped, putting extra pressure on “Elemental.” And rather than Disney fast-tracking it to Disney+ when it looked like it was going to be DOA, it’s had what we call “LEGS”: when a movie doesn’t suffer from huge drops in ticket sales week to week, and has a long lifespan in theaters.
I’m guessing that’s mostly due to positive word of mouth. “Elemental” has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and received an A grade from Cinemascore, an organization that surveys audiences on a movie’s opening night. That means that people who actually saw it early on really liked it, and they probably told others that they really liked it.
If a movie is good, that can still happen; it will probably be a big hit once it finally does land on Disney+, but at least it’s making some money beforehand. When I reported more extensively on box-office trends at Business Insider, exhibitor folks loved to tout a theatrical release as a marketing tool for an eventual streaming debut, and I think that will certainly be the case for “Elemental.”
The Bad News: It takes time to earn back audience goodwill
“Elemental” will end up being a lukewarm success story, but Pixar’s brand is still clawing its way back to the kind of relevance it once had. “Lightyear’s” failure didn’t inspire much confidence in Pixar, especially after three back-to-back streaming debuts. That likely trained a lot of families to wait for a Disney+ release, and if Pixar doesn’t perform well in theaters, that taints its brand.
It’s not even the awards powerhouse it once was: Pixar’s lost the animated feature Oscar the last two years, and I’m making a prediction that it will lose again this year. I only bring that up because Pixar movies used to be sure bets at the Oscars, in an era that also reflected their quality. The studio won four years in a row with “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E,” “Up,” and “Toy Story 3.” In the 12 years since the latter won, just four more Pixar movies have taken home the prize.
People appear to slowly be embracing the studio again with “Elemental,” but if Pixar still had the reputation it once had, the movie would be performing much better. Emerging from the pandemic, other animated movies have been far more successful, like this year’s billion-dollar-grossing “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”
Disney might think the way back to audience’s hearts is more sequels (“Toy Story 5” is in the works). I guess I don’t particularly blame the company for thinking that when “Finding Dory,” “Incredibles 2,” and “Toy Story 4” all grossed over $1 billion. But this is a different time, and I believe moviegoers are looking for new things to spend their money on when they go to the theater. We’ve seen new entries in long-running franchises this year, like “Transformers” and “Fast and Furious,” crash and burn because they have seemingly used up every ounce of audience goodwill they had left, while original movies like “Oppenheimer” and even “Barbie” surge ahead of expectations.
If Pixar is to thrive, it can’t rely on safe sequels (and neither can the rest of Hollywood).