The story of Pixar’s latest flop: Why is ‘Elio’ the animation studio’s worst box office opening?
The film has gone through two directors and its main character has lost his Latin soul and his love for fashion, confirming the difficulty faced by big studios when they tackle original stories
It could have been one of the cinematic stories of the summer; maybe even of the year. It was destined to be. However, Elio will end up being remembered, unfairly, as one of the big box office flops of 2025. There is always room for a comeback, as others have done before it, but the case continues to raise questions. The latest film from Pixar, the exquisite animation factory bought by Disney a couple of decades ago, hits Spanish theaters this Wednesday, but was released in most countries on May 20, including the United States, with a surprising dichotomy: beloved by viewers, visually beautiful... but with catastrophic box office results, the worst for Pixar in its entire history. And the reason for its resounding failure isn’t even entirely clear—although there seem to be several factors at play, from the timing to the change of directors. So the question is, what’s going on with Elio?
The movie has so far been a complete flop, although it remains to be seen how it fares in markets like Spain, where it’s arriving after a strong marketing campaign, or in Japan, starting in August. But in the U.S. and Canada, its largest and most important market and where it was shown in more than 3,700 theaters, it was also buoyed by favorable winds that nevertheless failed to get the ship to port. The film is estimated to have cost more than $150 million to make, but its first-day gross was just $9 million (seven times less than the highly anticipated Inside Out 2 from last year), and only $21 million for the entire opening weekend, from Thursday night through Sunday, which is normally the best-performing period. In the first two weeks, counting all markets, takings reached just under $72 million, according to Comscore. It’s been a free fall.
There is nothing like this in memory in Pixar’s nearly three-decade history. Not even with the flop that was Elemental. The film where a fire girl and a water boy fell in love and tried to overcome the barriers imposed by nature was released in June 2023 with $29.6 million in box office results on opening weekend. Not much, but almost a quarter more than the feature film about little 11-year-old Elio, who ends up abducted by aliens and having all kinds of space adventures.
No one could have imagined it, least of all Disney-Pixar. The Hollywood specialist for The New York Times, who claims to also be unable to understand the bad results, states that the company expected, at least “in the worst-case scenario,” that Elio would match Elemental and reach $30 million in the US and Canada in its opening weekend. It managed $35 million when adding global markets. But the studio is confident that, like Elemental, it will be a long-running film: like a little ant, it raked in cash all summer and managed to gross $150 million in the US and almost $500 million worldwide.
It’s not clear that this will be the case for Elio, however, and there are several factors contributing to this. Some box office experts claim that the timing of the release is unfavorable. It coincided—in the United States—with the release of the new How to Train Your Dragon remake, aimed at the same audience. Furthermore, Disney had not yet emerged (nor does it seem to have yet) from the tremendous success of Lilo & Stitch, which is approaching $1 billion in box office receipts (for a cost of $100 million). The fun adventures of the famous Experiment 626 continue to attract children to theaters, perhaps fascinated by a more classic animated story.
Elio tells a good story, but one that the audience isn’t familiar with. It forces them to step out of their comfort zone, pay attention, and embrace a novel narrative. He’s not the funny guy Stitch, nor those old friends Buzz and Woody, nor the good old Lightning McQueen. He’s a new character that children—and adults, who buy the tickets and popcorn, after all—have to learn to love and integrate into their narratives, and therefore into their stuffed animals, their backpacks, or their notebooks, with marketing now a fundamental part of every children’s film. It’s relatively easy to become number one in the world with Inside Out 2, which it did, selling $1.7 billion in tickets; it’s not so with Elio. But such a catastrophe wasn’t expected either.
Pixar, like any company, has to keep creating new characters and universes that feed children’s worlds. Viewers don’t live off Nemo and the histrionic Orange Anxiety alone. During the pandemic, it may have made a mistake by sending its films directly to Disney+ (although there weren’t many alternatives), although its return to theaters has been with all kinds of stories, including original ones. However, it’s been eight years, since Coco in 2017, since any new universe has really taken hold. And that shows that today, with tons of ingenious competitors (just look at the strength of last year’s Oscar nominees, where the Latvian film Flow won and The Wild Robot lagged behind, leaving Inside Out 2 in the dust), the Pixar brand alone isn’t enough.
A radically changed film
There’s something more to Elio. The story of the space-obsessed orphan boy has undergone changes to the script, structure, and even directors, all of which have affected the title. The film was announced in the summer of 2022 at D23, Disney’s biannual convention: the actor who would voice the boy was revealed, America Ferrera would play his mother, and the story would be directed by filmmaker Adrian Molina, who successfully co-directed Coco. Of the three, only little Yonas Kibreab remains.
The most significant departure has been Molina, replaced by two other Pixar regulars, directors Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian; Molina’s name doesn’t appear in the film’s opening credits, but surprisingly, it does in the closing credits. The official version from Pete Docter, the company’s head, is that Molina left Elio for “a priority project that we’re not ready to talk about yet,” as he told the specialized media outlet The Wrap a year ago, about which both the director and the company were “excited.” Predictably, the sequel to Coco. Docter also said that the new directors had made certain changes to Elio that would help the audience “connect and grow with the character.”
The unofficial version is somewhat more complex. According to a lengthy report in The Hollywood Reporter, Elio had a more defined personality: he was passionate about fashion, the environment, and gay. In the United States and under the Pixar codes—how can we forget the kiss between two women that generated so much buzz in Lightyear?—Molina’s intention in no way was to tell an openly homosexual story about a boy of barely 11 years old, but rather to show hints (for example, he had a poster of a boy crush in his room), but that wasn’t possible either. According to Molina’s collaborators on the film, that part gradually faded away until it disappeared.
At a test screening held that summer in 2023, a group of viewers said they liked the film; however, when asked if they would go see it in theaters, no one said yes. Shortly after, another screening for Pixar executives, who didn’t fully understand the character’s development, ended with Molina leaving. It’s unclear whether the company advised him to move on or if, as sources close to him explain in that report, he himself decided it wasn’t the story he wanted to tell and moved on to another project. Ferrera also left with him, despite having her lines already recorded, disenchanted because Elio no longer had Latino representation. Finally, the boy has no mother in the story, only an aunt, voiced by Zoe Saldaña.
One of the film’s editors says that she and other colleagues felt somewhat betrayed by the company after Molina’s departure, causing the film to lose part of its identity and spirit. “The Elio that reached theaters is much worse than Adrian’s original version,” says the editor, who is also part of an LGBTQ+ group at the animation company. She explains to The Hollywood Reporter that there was “an exodus of talent after that cut, which is very indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work.” In addition to the talent, it seems that the millions have also vanished.
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