Did you know Pixar released a new film recently? If the answer is “no,” you’re not alone.
The movie is called Elio. It’s about an awkward 11-year-old orphan boy who dreams of being abducted by aliens. Predictably enough, that’s exactly what happens when alien species at the Communiverse mistake him for earth’s leader.
That all sounds like a decent premise for a kids’ sci-fi film — but apparently it wasn’t good enough to get people into theaters to watch it. Elio’s box office performance was abysmal, to put it mildly. It made just $35 million in global ticket sales, which earned it the unenviable award of “Worst Box Office Opening Ever for a Pixar Movie.”
The weekend went so badly that Pixar released a rather aggressive TikTok ad a few days ago chastising audiences for complaining about Disney’s lack of original stories while staying home from theaters when those stories are hitting the box office. (READ MORE: We Owe Brad Pitt an Apology. Seriously.)
@pixar Go see Pixar’s newest ORIGINAL movie Elio, in theaters NOW! ✨????️ @rebanora
Fair enough, but the problem with Elio wasn’t the audience.
Not only did the set design for the alien world look like something someone might dream up while on psychedelic drugs, the plot was confusing and reviewers found the script choppy and unconvincing at key moments.
That said, there was a win. The film is noticeably devoid of the kinds of woke themes we’ve come to expect in Disney and Pixar movies. This wasn’t Turning Red, where filial disobedience is encouraged, or Lightyear, in which a same-sex couple kisses on screen, or Elemental, which featured a nonbinary character. That wasn’t by accident. Elio was reportedly scrubbed of anything that might appear even a little bit woke — much to some creatives’ chagrin.
After speaking to artists who had worked with on the film, the Hollywood Reporter divulged this week that the main character, Elio, was supposed to be queer-coded (there were pictures of a male crush originally featured on his bedroom wall in one scene and he was supposed to don a pink tank top made out of trash collected on a beach in another) — a move that would have made sense given that the original director, Adrian Molina, is an openly gay filmmaker.
Sometime in 2023, Molina showed his nearly finished work to Pixar and Disney executives in a private screening. By all accounts, it didn’t go over particularly well. Apparently, the executives weren’t interested in producing yet another woke film audiences wouldn’t want to watch.
Molina ultimately left the project in the middle of production to work on Coco 2, and a former assistant editor at Pixar told the Hollywood Reporter that there was an “[e]xodus of talent” after new co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi took over rewriting the new non-woke version of the story. (READ MORE: How to Create a Mediocre Remake)
By all accounts, the rewrite was rather drastic — so much so that a former Pixar artist who worked on the film complained that the changes had emptied the story of any meaning: “[Y]ou remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity,” the artist told the Hollywood Reporter, “and Elio just becomes about totally nothing.”
It makes sense that liberal Hollywood creatives would be frustrated by Pixar’s failure to shove LGBTQ themes down audiences’ throats, and that they would then blame any subsequent failure on the scrubbing of themes. But they’re missing the point.
For once, Pixar finally did the right thing: It produced a movie parents can comfortably take their kids to watch in theaters without worrying about the underlying (or sometimes, readily apparent) woke messaging. So why wasn’t the film a success?
One could justifiably blame poor marketing. Maybe the obnoxious reuse of the “bean mouth” (an animation style critics don’t tend to be big fans of) really did keep audiences home. Perhaps the awkward script — seemingly the victim of the rewrite — or the rather uncreative plot made the whole film unappealing (although Elio does currently have an 83 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t as bad as you’d think, given that the film was a total flop).
But while those issues likely did contribute to the film’s failure to perform (especially the meager marketing), it’s impossible to ignore the fact that, over the last decade, Pixar and its parent company Disney have been wholeheartedly participating in and promoting woke ideology. Even as recently as March, Disney released its ill-fated woke version of Snow White. At this point, no parent can be blamed for not trusting these studios with making wholesome, family-friendly movies. (READ MORE: Frederick Forsyth: The Better Craftsman)
That puts executives like Bob Iger and Pete Docter in a tough spot (one they arguably put themselves in). On one hand, the market is telling them that going woke means box office failure. On the other, they have a bunch of unruly LGBTQ activists as artists, editors, and directors. Somehow, before it’s too late and their studios go under, they have to convince parents that it’s safe to take their kids to movie theaters again.
That’s going to be a long uphill battle. One hopes they’re willing to wage it.