It had been projected to open at $140 million domestic a few weeks ago. Just before release, that was chopped in half to $70 million domestic, which itself would have been a failure for a movie costing $250 million or more.
Actual first weekend take? 55 million.
A Disney news analyst, WDW_Pro, said the film will be one of the costliest failures of all time, and may lose $300 million.
Disney Pixar released the cartoon Elemental as counter-programming. It failed to counter-program. People largely just decided to sit out this stinker of a movie weekend. Disney Pixar's latest disaster made only $29 million, not even reaching the very low $31-41 million opening that had been projected.
"The Flash," a superhero adventure starring Ezra Miller, emerged victorious over Pixar's "Elemental" in a battle of box office lightweights.
This weekend's two new releases were once expected to ignite the summer blockbuster season; instead, both entirely missed the mark. "The Flash" stumbled with $55 million and "Elemental" collected just $29.5 million in their respective debuts. Both films fell short of already-low expectations. Worse, they were pricy endeavors, costing $200 million to make and roughly $100 million to market, so they are shaping up to be huge disappointments in their theatrical runs.
Elemental is now Pixar's biggest bomb, opening even lower than its previous bigger bomb, The Good Dinosaur. (Which I saw half of -- I don't understand why it was a bomb, it was really cute and touching.)
But there's no sugar-coating the debut of "Elemental," which landed by far the worst start in modern history for Pixar, ranking below some of its more forgettable attempts like 2015's "The Good Dinosaur" ($39 million) and 2020's "Onward" ($39 million). The animation empire behind "Toy Story," "Up" and "Ratatouille" hasn't been able to rebound from the pandemic, when several of its titles were sent directly to Disney+ and family audiences were trained to expect those movies at home.
It's been a difficult market for films with original stories like "Elemental," which revolves around the relationship between the two seemingly different elements of fire and water.
Great, another 100 minute lecture about "diversity" and race relations. It just never gets old. Ever.
And movie prices have inflated by almost 2x since The Good Dinosaur, so half as many people bought tickets to Elemental.
BTW, Pink News claims that one of the child characters in Elemental is non-binary. (Link to Breitbart.) I haven't seen the latest Disney Groomer Offering so I can't confirm that -- but Disney personnel have bragged of sneaking their "not-so-secret gay agenda" into every film, no matter how young the target audience.
Hollywood "journalists" are finally being forced to notice: Disney is in trouble.
Recent misses and low expectations for 'Elemental' beg the question: Has Pixar lost its magic touch? Perhaps the answer is that original animation is now a smaller business--one that can't necessarily support the unique culture and $200 million budgets that made Pixar great in the first place.The speculation is that Pixar will have to make cheaper movies, and will probably not even survive as its own unit. It will likely be merged with the also-failing Disney Animation studio. They'll share staff and the name "Pixar" will just be attached to half of the cartoons, "Disney Animation" to the other half.
"The Flash" reportedly has CGI so bad it looks like it came from the early 2000s. Most likely reason: They realized they had a bomb on their hands and gave the order to do no further work. Just rush these unfinished, wonky special effects out to the theaters to try to lose as little money as possible.
You may wonder why DC didn't just cancel The Flash and get a tax write-off from it, as they did with Batgirl? Either Valiant Renegade or WDW_Pro explained why they didn't: because they had already pre-sold the foreign rights for The Flash, and so they were legally obligated to go through with the release. Otherwise, they speculate, Discovery Warner would indeed have just burned the film of the Flash and used the costs to reduce their tax bill. (Batgirl was just going to be an HBO Max release, so there was no pre-sale of foreign distribution rights.)
And on the horizon: the coming disaster, Indiana Jones and the Kathleen Kennedy Self-Insert.
A week ago I mentioned Doomcock's and Kamran Pasha's rumor that Disney might try to sell Lucasfilm. WDW_Pro had a good reason for why that can never happen: Right now, investors all kind of know that Disney is in trouble but don't know-know it.
If Disney were to sell Lucasfilm, which would have to be at a loss, suddenly they would have actual proof that Disney had run Lucasfilm into the ground. Yes, they kinda knew this, but if Lucasfilm sold for $1.5 billion, down from its original $4.05 billion price, investors would know-know it.
And then they would also consider that Pixar, bought for $7.4 billion, has also been run into the ground, the MCU, bought for $4 billion, is also producing very "meh" movies too.
And what has Disney done with its $70 billion purchase, Fox Studios? Almost nothing.
So the moment Disney confirms that LucasFilm is now worth less than half than what they paid for it, investors begin figuring that these other pricey purchases are also probably worth less than half of what Disney paid for them, and Disney's share value plummets on this new information.
So selling LucasFilm for $1.5 billion would probably wipe out $10 billion of Disney's share value.
That means that Disney has to hold on to all of these purchases just to hide their real (greatly diminished) value from the market.