The movie industry has debuted a pretty strong summer so far. From the live action Lilo & Stitch to the final installment of the Mission Impossible franchise, the top five movies of the summer have grossed more than $1 billion domestically — par for the course of a new post-COVID high many thought would never return. Yet, it seems like Disney’s Pixar missed the last train out.
Not only is Pixar failing at production output — with only one summer release this year — but that lone film, Elio, has proven to be the studio’s biggest flop in its 30-year history, grossing only $21 million over its opening weekend on an astronomical $250 million budget.
The Good ol’ Days
While Pixar’s cultural imprint may make it feel like the studio’s been around forever, it’s a relatively new entrant in the age of computer animation. Founded in 1979 as a graphics division of Lucasfilm, it wasn’t until 1995 when Pixar put out its first independently produced feature, Toy Story, which set the industry standard for a new era of expressively animated films. Toy Story, along with many other Pixar films over the following decade — Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), and Wall-E (2008), to name a few — formed a generation of millennials and zoomers, who, as adults, distilled their childhood nostalgia into pure American culture.
Ask an average Gen Xer or older about these films, and he will surely know the gist; of course, Nemo’s dad finds him in the end. But unless he or she had small children in the 2010s, it’s far less likely he will know the story of relatively obscure Pixar films like Brave (2012), Coco (2017), or even the top grossing American animated film of all time, Inside Out 2 (2024).
This film was the rare exception to Pixar’s continual decline, as Axios notes. With flop after relative flop, Pixar has never been able to regain the dominance it held in the 2000s, despite attempting to capitalize on millennial nostalgia with spin-offs and sequels. Now, having seemingly hit rock bottom with Elio, the flop reflects less on the merits of the film itself and more on the studio’s failed vision and determination to merely coast on its legacy.
Elio Repeats Pixar’s Monotonous Plot and Features
On its face, Elio is fine. The few who did see it liked it well enough, with Rotten Tomatoes scores hovering in the 80-90 percent range. There’s nothing overtly political or preachy about it, besides the baseline of demographic change where a disabled, little, brown boy becomes the new face of the all-American underdog. After enduring much peer-bullying, the boy makes a desperate plea to aliens to help him “find a place to fit in.”
Much to his surprise, aliens heed his call, and he becomes the intergalactic representative for Earth, who — surprise, surprise — must find a way to save the world from an alien baddie. The film offers plenty of boyhood wonder, misadventure, and self-discovery — every prerequisite to a good coming-of-age story. But it adds nothing new to either the genre or the Pixar oeuvre.
Making original films is a “rough time,” one Pixar executive said amidst the flop, but the alternative is “making Toy Story 27.” This shows a total misunderstanding of the impasse Pixar currently faces.
Elio, crushed under the weight of its derivative storytelling and animation, might as well have been an umpteenth sequel. The viewer walks in and, within moments, already knows he’s seen this film a thousand times.
Most jarring is the animation. What was once novel and innovative has solidified into the norm for Pixar’s industry-leading computer animation. The studio has reused its characters’ expressive doughy features for more than a decade. With his oversized head, rounded pudgy face, and short limbs and torso to accentuate movement and personality, Elio might as well have been Boo from Monsters, Inc. or even Remy from Ratatouille. While still friendly and inviting, these familiar features are now merely the template that has lost much of its original charm.
Yet the studio resists change, even as other animation styles and studios — most notably the Oscar-nominated Spider-Verse franchise, which feels quite literally like a comic book come to life — set a new standard for the industry. From the canonically accurate animation of the new Lego movies to the unique “2.5D” effect of Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots, no shortage of shake-ups is on the horizon.
Pixar’s Old, Dying Legacy
When Pixar was the only boss in town, it could afford to coast on its legacy of innovation. Where else could audiences turn? Yet many other legacy institutions, riding on gatekept inertia, have watched their earned prestige fall away. Pixar is getting its first taste of the fact that a captive audience cannot remain captive forever.
Just like establishment political factions, the mainstream media, and much of corporate America, Pixar seems to have gotten a little too comfortable in its role as a standard bearer. This comes with a serious blind side: as Americans, sick of the status quo, look elsewhere for representation, or information, or entertainment, legacy institutions can do nothing but grumble at usurpers for failing to recognize inherited legitimacy.
Even if these aging groups wanted to give up control, they don’t have the necessary vision to adapt to a changing world. They only think in the terms they already know and cling to their last shred of relevance. Just as the Democratic National Convention insisted Americans are too racist to appreciate them, Pixar could continue making the same movies while blaming viewers for the inevitable flop.
Let’s hope this isn’t the case. The studio has been a boon to childhood wonder for two generations. If it can get past its self-imposed strictures, then it can surely offer the same magic to new generations. Long ago, Pixar took viewers “to infinity” — but now it’s time to look “beyond.”