Pixar's Elemental Has A Mediocre Box Office. Why That Annoys Me

It may not be fair, but when the rubber meets the road, the box office take is what matters when a new movie is released. It doesn’t matter what the audiences that go to the movie actually think of it, or what professional critics think. What matters is if enough people spent money to buy tickets, and by that metric, Pixar’s new romance, Elemental, is already looking like a failure.

Elemental's Juneteenth opening weekend brought in less than $30 million, which is a record low for Pixar, at least when adjusting for inflation. It’s an infuriating result to see for a film’s opening weekend, because as I said in my Elemental review, it's actually a great movie in its own right. Its failure likely has little to nothing to do with its quality, and everything to do with business decisions that determined this result long before the movie arrived in theaters.

Elemental Is Everything People Say They Want From New Movies

Franchises have been core to the Hollywood process almost since the beginning, but we exist in an era where they seem to be the only thing anybody cares about. Every movie is either part of a franchise or an attempt to become one, resulting in everything we see in theaters seemingly being a sequel to something we’ve seen before.

But a lot of people claim this isn’t what they want. They lament the seeming death of “original” stories created by filmmakers who truly have something to say, who want to make movies that are “about things.” That’s what Elemental is; it’s a creative new story that isn’t a sequel to anything we’ve seen before. The movie is, at once, a technical achievement in animation that even Elemental's director wasn't sure was possible, while also being an emotional story about what it’s like to grow up the child of immigrants.

It’s also unique in the way that uses animation to tell a story that we don’t usually see told in this medium. Elemental is ultimately a romance, a character-driven drama about two people falling in love. These are stories we don’t usually see told through the medium of animation. Elemental is no less bound by what we expect animated movies to be than Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Audiences Are Clearly Skipping Theaters For Pixar Movies Thanks To Disney+

But while people say that they want a certain kind of movie, Elementals’s box office shows us that they didn’t show up for this one. It’s not that people aren't going to see animated movies. The box office for The Super Mario Bros. Movie makes it clear that audiences will absolutely show up for animated family films in theaters. So what’s different about this one?

What’s most obviously different is that over the course of the global pandemic, Disney released three Pixar films originally planned for theaters directly onto Disney+ for free. Luca, Soul and Turning Red never saw theatrical releases. And while Disney released several of its pandemic-era movies as Premiere Access, including its own animated movie, Raya and the Last Dragon, Pixar movies were not given the additional paywall.

While it was likely seen at the time as a nice gesture to not make every movie cast $30 when theaters were closed, the fact that only Pixar was treated this way has all but certainly caused a degradation of the studio’s name in the mind of the consumer. Pixar movies aren’t worth as much as other Disney movies, they belong on streaming services. And with the window between theatrical and streaming releases now shortened, people don’t even need to wait that long to watch Pixar movies on Disney+.

We saw LIghtyear already fall victim to this same problem. That movie, despite it not being a direct Toy Story sequel, should have been expected to do better than it did in theaters considering its franchise connection.

Disney’s Lack Of Promotion Didn’t Help Matters

Of course, while the public may have a perception that Pixar belongs on Disney+ now, this can certainly be overcome. However, doing so requires time, effort and, more specifically, money. You have to promote the fact that your new movie is coming to theaters and that theaters are the place you need to see it, but very little was done to draw fans back there.

While a lot of my evidence here is anecdotal, as somebody who covers theme parks at CinemaBlend, I spend a lot of time on social media amongst people for whom Disney is a big deal. Even in those spaces, I found people who were either unaware that Elemental was even happening, or at the very least not aware that it was actually out until opening weekend was already half over. Clearly if the core audience doesn’t know what’s going on, the casual audience will have zero clue.

Disney/Pixar Will Learn The Wrong Lessons From Elementals Failures

And the worst part is that while Disney could likely take Elemental’s box office struggles as an indication that more marketing focus should have been given to the project, or that the studio needs to do more in some other ways to remind audiences how good Pixar movies are on the big screen, that’s not the lesson that Disney will take because no studio in the history of Hollywood has ever learned the right lesson from a box office bomb.

It will be assumed that since audiences didn’t go see Elemental, audiences don’t want new, original concepts from Pixar. This will simply reinforce the idea that what everybody wants is sequels to the franchises they already know. So many voices claimed that Toy Story 4 was a movie that nobody asked for, but people went to see it enough numbers that we’re now getting a Toy Story 5, and people are once again claiming it’s a movie nobody wants. But if we don’t give the non-franchise movies a chance, then that’s all we’re going to get.

And it’s ok that people like franchises. I do too, but franchises need to start somewhere. Elemental creates a world full of interesting characters that could be the start of a new franchise. Perhaps we could see the next step in the relationship between Ember and Wade, or maybe we could meet entirely new characters who simply live in this same world. But that only happens if the people in charge believe there is money to be made by making more of these movies.

It’s still possible that Elemental could rebound. The reviews among both the audience that has seen the film and professional critics have been strong overall, so perhaps word of mouth will end up bringing the box office in before the theatrical run is over. If you haven’t seen Elemental, I recommend it. Even if the movie isn’t your absolute favorite, if original animated films from one of the best studios in the world are something you want more of, then Elemental is a film worthy of support.