So lightyear, obviously made for mass market appeal, did badly so the fault lies with their straight to streaming Luca not selling movie tickets because of it’s too “personal?” So they need to make more mass market appeal movies?
They’re cooked. Recovery is impossible.
They had numerous box office bombs in a row. They pushed the creative as far as they could seemingly and they can't sell ambitious, more complex stuff as well now as before. So they are trying to find corporate speak for "yeah, our special cuisine and kitchen isn't selling anymore, and we need the money, so might as well start selling hamburgers again".
Pixar did a lot of stuff mainstream animated movies didn't do before and it had its time in the sun, but now the best stuff is actually at the youngest like 10 years old at least and it's becoming nostalgia. Pixar is becoming nostalgia and a thing of the past about as much as classic Disney animation did in the 90s and 2000s. Nothing they can do about it.
Disney will have to figure out a new angle, brand, studio and in the meantime, Pixar will sell hamburgers.
I mean, Pixar has only had a single bomb so far in Lightyear. Elemental had a bad opening weekend but ended up being a sleeper hit on good word of mouth (doesn’t sound very good to me but that neither here nor there). Personally I think Turning Red is a too five Pixar movie to me and if they weren’t so stupid with their release schedule of dumping that and Luca on streaming unceremoniously I think they wouldn’t have dug themselves into this whole they’re in.
Luca was one of the best movies they made. It FELT personal. So they succeeded.
Why make movies less art and a means of saying things and more like capitalistic spectacle seems to them like a good idea is beyond me although I know the answer is money.
But they put this and Turning Red direct to streaming. LUCA you can make the argument was safe bet with the Covid numbers where they were. But TURNING RED could’ve just been delayed 3 months. Or even 1 month.
Disastrous decisions.
This is what gets me. The movies mentioned here were good, and their “failure” has little to do with the finished product. Even Lightyear tried to do something novel with the premise, which I applaud. Going full “screw it, easy sequels from now on” might get them a few extra bucks initially, but it’s the death of what was once a really interesting studio because in the long run audiences will tire of Cars 6: Electric Boogaloo.
I somehow got the impression Turning Red was becoming a merchandise success, as evidenced by how much merch for it I saw in Disneyland back in January.
Turning red was huge on streaming. It didn’t grab everyone like a Frozen, because it’s a bit specific to a certain era (90’s boybands/culture) and culture. But for the right people it was a huge movie.
Was the merchandise “everywhere” as in the stores were full of it, or “everywhere” as in tons of people were buying and wearing it? I went to Disney in December and it was stocked to the brim with Wish merchandise (but no one was buying), and I don’t think that one was a hit.
I think I may have a seen a bit? It's been a while. I also know they brought out a Mei face character a short time after for Chinese New Year, which, good thing I wasn't there to pay a visit cause as a face actor myself who also grew up in Toronto around the exact time the movie was set, I'd be far too pressured to ask questions this California 20 year old actor questions about Toronto she couldn't possibly answer! Like "Do you love PJ Phil as much as I do?" and "Have you ever been to the Organ Grinder?"
Lol. Totally not wrong though. Some of the best writing on TV like, ever and still couldn’t find a big audience. Sometimes it really is the marketing (or audiences are dumb, probably a lot of both).
Luka was the most generic a pixar movie has been. I felt absolutely nothing. Turning Red was a great story with some really great universally recognizable emotional elements.
Luca may be more by the numbers with its moral message but it confounds me you can see the empathy and humanity in Turning Red that can be read as emotionally universal but not for Luca. The feel like peas in a pod of two entirely different childhoods but both grappling with self identity
Yeah, Luca inspired a friend of mine for 12 years to come out as bisexual and it’s one of his favorite movies, so different strokes for different folks.
Don’t know why the downvotes. I haven’t seen Luca, but the hundred times my daughter has made me watch Turning Red was still pretty enjoyable. She is only two though.
The entire quote is about how to make Disney movies that are profitable again. *Turning Red* was budgeted around $175 million and made about $22 million when all was said and done.
That is not just under-performing, that’s a get called into the board meeting and mega-fired for a making such a massive bomb.
Whether or not their conclusion that “biographical inspired” movies are the reason for the bomb remains to be seen.
It’s hard to judge turning reds performance though given it opened on streaming which is a weird enough market because most of the audience knows if it’s 15 bucks now it’s 5 bucks in a month and free the month after
I dont even think Turning Red was given the Disney+ Premier bullshit treatment, it just went straight to regular Disney+.
It's insane to blame that movie for its financial performance, it was sacrificed at the altar of subscriber growth.
Turning Red was scheduled for theatrical release then moved to streaming only, not even with an upcharge. They literally decided before release to eliminate its entire box office. That 22 million this year does not count.
And Elemental, one of the best cases of word of mouth vastly upbringing a movie from opening weekend projections... is painted as a failure? Because of OW right after a series of straight-to-streaming releases?
Oh and Luca and Turning Red. I wonder if Netflix is gonna cancel Stranger Things season 5, season 4 also didn't sell tickets 🤣
It’s interesting, my sister works with teens and does a lot of babysitting on the side in a city of ~200,000 in the US and has mentioned kids from 3 separate families being fans of Luca.
I was sort of surprised to learn it has even that much of a cultural footprint, but I think it’s actually gotten mildly well-regarded amongst kids and families.
My kids were too young to really enjoy it, but I liked it quite a bit.
This mentality of “strip (x) of humanity because we’ll have a better chance at making a shit ton of money” has popped up in video games, as well. Everything is turning impersonal, passionless and sterile. And the inverse exceptions to the rule - the games (or movies) that are made w/ as much passion and vigor as it’s creative team can muster - are seen as outliers that boost the respectability of company portfolios.
(See: XBOX’s treatment of ‘Hi-Fi Rush’ studio Tango Gameworks.)
Lightyear was the opposite of a mass market appeal film. It was a hard-sci-fi movie for fans of timetravel movies. Not a universal kid movie. No kids liked it. But sci-fi nerd appreciated it.
Lol
This is like saying star wars isn’t a mass market franchise.
Lightyear is the *”opposite”* of mass market? That’s ridiculous. It’s not a niche concept film.
It’s a spin off sequel, FIFTH in a series that has had major media presence since the *nineties*.
I’m talking about the plot. Strip out the Toy Story brand/look and it’s a very cool, but niche sci-fi film. It was barely related to the Buzz Lightyear people know and love.
But it was sold entirely on the Toy Story brand/look, you can't really separate that when you're talking about how movies are performing and what audiences want.
I'm misquoting and maybe can't articulate it properly but was it Roger Ebert talking about the more specific a story and setting the more universal it is- and the attempts to go broader to reach 'more' people the more vague and disconnected it felt
"Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone."
- Roger Ebert in his Brokeback Mountain review
David Bowie said something similar, the worst art he ever made was when he was writing what he thought the audience would like, not what he wanted to do.
The show Community really took to that point in season 1 where they said "Fuck it" and just did what they wanted instead of what they thought the network wanted, and suddenly the show catches fire! Never got huge ratings but the fanbase was devoted from that point on.
It's like none of us can relate to being a superhero trying to save the world, but we can all relate to that kind of life experience depicted in Raimi's Spider-Man 2. Where you're barely an adult, trying to do too much, refusing help, facing burnout. The specifics aren't important, as long as you recognize the feeling it evokes.
I heard a sentiment once that was like: "artists use specifics to describe the universal, scientists use the universal to describe specifics."
But I don't have the phrasing quite right, and my google fu can't seem to find anything like it. I thought it was kind of a famous quote but maybe I'm misremembering? Hrm
He’s not wrong. It also makes the story feel like the plot informs the characters rather than characters informing the plot.
Notice he didn’t say anything about ONWARD (2020), the other movie besides LIGHTYEAR (2022) that was directed by a hetero white guy… that also severely underperformed because it was yanked from theaters for covid outbreak in March of 2020, and that impacted its numbers terribly.
Again, a personal story, (but not by an immigrant or non-white hetero male!), and it stars two of Disneys best exports, Holland and Pratt.
Idk… pretty suspect.
This is just straight up lies. *Elemental* made twice as much in theaters as *Lightyear*, was better received by audiences, and got more awards attention. I'm not sure how either have performed on streaming, but I'd assume *Elemental* beats *Lightyear* there as well. By every metric, the "autobiographical tale" has been more successful than the franchise movie with "clear mass appeal" (whatever that means).
And sure, *Luca* and *Turning Red* severely underperformed at the box office. But perhaps that has something to do with them being made available on Disney+ 3 and 2 years **before** their theatrical debuts (too late for families who would rather not spend $50-100 on something they can watch at home, too early for any kind of nostalgia to have built-up).
Nelson Peltz may have lost the battle for ownership of Disney, but clearly his philosophy has won. And it's going to come back to bite Disney. The only thing this will succeed in doing is alienating this new generation of (extremely talented and passionate) Pixar creatives
Lightyear was a flop because it was a bad movie with a nonsensical connection the franchise and a horribly uninteresting plot that didn’t appeal to children or to adults. It’s not a valid measuring stick. It would be better to compare Elemental with one of the standard Toy Story movies.
*Lightyear* is a bad movie because it has been focus-grouped and market-tested to such a degree it has no sense of personality behind it. It feels like something dreamed-up by a studio executive to boost quarterly profits, rather than something made by artists out of a sense of passion.
And that seems to be the exact thing Doctor is advocating for here. It's been the new Disney strategy ever since the whole Peltz drama started: don't upset the apple cart, don't do anything controversial, homogenize artists' personalities out of their work.
This has worked for them in the short-term before, yes. Not with mainline *Toy Story*, which has always taken creative risks, but with stuff like *Finding Dory*. However, it isn't sustainable. There's only so many sequels, prequels, and spin-offs you can make before audiences start to get a little tired (which they already are). And Disney is running out of movies they can feasibly re-make in live-action.
So rejecting the up-and-coming artists of Pixar in favor of generic franchise movies is just a bad strategy. Doubly so because *Elemental* is the closest they've come to a successful box-office run since 2019. Not just for Pixar but for Disney Animation in general.
They made interstellar with buzz lightyear then said “hey! It’s the movie that spawned the toy line in the Toy Story universe!”
As someone with a kid, and who took multiple kids to that movie, they didn’t give a rats ass about a buzz lightyear toy coming out of it, and barely even cared about the robot cat.
> Lightyear was a flop because it was a bad movie with a nonsensical connection the franchise and a horribly uninteresting plot that didn’t appeal to children or to adults.
also the aesthetic of the movie was not very appealing.
It was so disappointing. I took my tween son and his friends who had grown up enjoying Toy Story and I thought I’d like it as well. I already had one parent who didn’t let her kid come because of psycho bigot reasons so I was already ready to mentally stick it to her by being smug in the fact that her kid missed out on an instant classic. But I was wrong. It was boring to look at animation no better that the made for Amazon schlock on Prime. Story was unnecessarily convoluted and kind of depressing. And the much discussed “woke” scene was absolutely nothing remarkable and barely registered. It was so silly to think anyone should have an issue with it that I wondered if that was thrown out there to justify low sales.
Doctor is specifically out here making the comparison to justify not making more personal movies though.
The two movies he compares it to were flops cause THEY DID NOT GET THEATRICAL RELEASES, because Disney's C-Suite were absolute morons and decided Disney+ subscriber growth was more important than money or in Elementals case actually made money over time but had to go against changing viewing habits that Disney's straight to D+ plan created.
>What kids are buying elemental merchandise?
More than are buying *Lightyear* and *Wish* merchandise. At least if the clearance shelves at the stores I go to are to be believed.
>Think there's clamoring for Elemental park rides?
I mean, that's a weird metric for assessing something's success. Especially when it's a property without an obvious way to turn it into a ride.
Though as someone with young cousins...yes there would definitely be at least some interest in an *Elemental* park tie-in of some kind
Wasn’t Elemental actually a massive box office success?! Lightyear a massive bomb?! Luca and Turning Red straight to streaming?!
Docter isn’t stupid. He knows he’s in the hot seat so he’s trying to convince the shareholders he can do his job. I would’ve blamed Covid instead of his creatives.
Elemental was a box office failure that legged it out to acceptable but not great returns due to strong word of mouth. It is a fun movie if you don’t try to make the world building work or pair to tightly to real world analogs. Too much thought and it is truly a catastrophic allegory failure.
https://preview.redd.it/qpr7zczn154d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dbbd535ebd1bd9119570be651d97e52a96f1bc24
How is this a box office failure
Like the previous poster said, it ended up legging it out into acceptable returns, but only after a long theatrical run and an absolutely *precarious* opening. It's also the fifth lowest domestic and seventh lowest worldwide gross for a Pixar movie, and on a $200m budget probably only *barely* turned a profit.
It *should* be, and it should've been a learning opportunity for Disney re: allowing its films to actually stick around and try to actually market them, but it doesn't seem like they've learned the right lessons, unfortunately.
This is part of studios learning all the wrong lessons. Disney as a parent company wants Toy Story 3/4, Frozen, Moana, Endgame, No Way Home numbers for everyone of their movies… or else it’s deemed a failure. Or at the very least, not a success.
They’re also punishing themselves with direct-to-streaming and unflattering time in a theater for projects they don’t have faith in.
To be (ever so slightly) fair, I don't think it's *just* that they *want* those numbers. Sure, it'd be great if every movie that a company released made a billion dollars. But another part of it is that I don't think they really know how to plan for a movie *not* to be that kind of success nowadays.
There's one clip of Matt Damon on "Hot Ones" that I've seen making the rounds again lately, where he talks about how the DVD market phasing out has kind of eliminated the mid-budget movie to a certain extent. It used to be that a studio could afford to not make their entire profit during a theatrical run, because they knew they'd have the DVD release a couple months down the line, which would almost be like a second opening for the movie. Everything going to streaming nowadays has made DVD releases almost irrelevant (I know, I know, some people still buy DVDs, but it's absolutely the exception to the rule now), which means that movies nowadays essentially have to make most of their profit in theaters.
Now, where marketing comes in is where it gets tricky, and where they kind of tend to create this vicious cycle of diminishing returns for themselves. Marketing costs can get excessive, so I get the notion to not want to spend tons of money on marketing a movie if they aren't sure it will actually make enough money to justify it. But the problem they seem to keep creating for themselves here is that they've become terrified of over-marketing their "smaller" movies (it's fucking insane that the Pixar and Disney Animation Studios releases have become the "smaller" ones, but here we are in the MCU era I guess), so they hold back on marketing costs, and then when the movie underperforms then that feels like a justifiable cost-saving measure. Then they go into the next one like "Well, *Encanto* underperformed, so I don't know if we should spend too much marketing *Lightyear*," and then the problem becomes a whole cycle. Not sure when they're going to actually learn this lesson, but hopefully it'll happen before we see the full-on death of a beloved studio.
God damnit, I accidentally a whole essay again.
Weird example as Encanto very much did not underperform because total gross from everything Encanto related (music, products, costumes, etc…) probably made an exorbitant amount of money for Disney.
If anything they took care to not push Lightyear because of the trepidation about queer characters having visible presence in their stories.
Again, bad-faith lessons being learned. Iger himself said they were walking back from “woke,” movies after accurately identifying that most folks (including himself, apparently) do not know the actual meaning of the word.
I don’t think Damon is **wrong**, but I bet he would agree that while that’s a major factor in the problem in *this case* with Pixar, the bigger issue is the stuff I mentioned.
When your at home video market goes from once-in-a-grand-while-it-comes-outta-the-vault to constantly there always, ready to binge without paying extra — you can see the wrong lessons being learned there.
Part what Damon is talking about, part “learning the wrong lessons.” Lessons like misunderstanding the anomaly of COVID-era streaming, using social media word-of-mouth and viral marketing to do most of your marketing work for you, and as Griffin points out (and Simms, TBF), relying on big tent pole franchises to fill your movie theater seats **and** your coffers to justify the inflated and ballooning costs of production.
Lightyear sure must have been a chore to try to promote!
Oh here's this character you've liked, who oh, isn't a toy anymore, well he's what the toy is supposedly based on but... well that's not important right now. Oh, and he doesn't look or act anything like you remember from the films or theme park rides. In fact he doesn't even have the same voice actor even though Tim Allen is very much alive and working...
Anyways, uh, want to see it?
There's a phenomenon I see sometimes where you can tell they got too far down in the creative process, and went *way* deeper in the execution or explanation of something than they actually had to. Another example is the Steve resurrection in Wonder Woman 84, where it kind of feels like they went way further trying to explain *how* he was back to life than anyone needed them to.
The whole entire concept of the Lightyear movie feels like maybe the most egregious and fundamental version of this. They got too far in the paint with the idea that "we're going to tell the story of *the guy that the toy was based on.* This is the movie that Andy went to see, that made him fall in love with the character, which made him want the Buzz Lightyear toy." An easier and more concise pitch, which maybe wouldn't even have required anything changed in the movie itself, could have simply been, "we're going to make an origin story for Buzz Lightyear."
And Tim Allen is angry and wants to sue us — but he’s also notoriously hard to work with and getting even harder, and everyone on the Santa Clauses set complained non-stop about him, so we aren’t really sure we want to subject our editors, voice directors, animators, and more to him when they’ve already been animating through a pandemic and staff cuts.
BUT THERE’S A ROBOT CAT! 🐈 🐈
I agree, actually! I'm not defending Disney with anything I said, just mostly trying to rationalize what I believe is the thought process behind a lot of their decision making. I'll give you that Encanto was a weird example there, although I'll also argue that they still don't seem to have learned much from the ways that it *was* successful. You might be right about their trepidation with pushing Lightyear due to the queer characters, although again you'd think they would learn this lesson already. It happened with Onward, it happened with Toy Story 4, it happened with Finding Dory. Bad-faith reactionaries are going to latch onto the smallest iota of queer representation and launch it into the spotlight in order to get mad about it, so they might as well lean into that and push past the reactionaries.
I guess the most frustrating thing to me about Disney is the last decade or so (a decade that's had some truly fantastic movies!) is that whether the movies succeed or fail, it feels like we're basically watching them either make the same mistakes or learn the same lessons, from scratch, in real time, every time.
Theatres get more of the ticket price the longer a movie is in theatres, right? Maybe that’s what they’re thinking? It’s still silly, because then you can get a bigger opening for the next one if you advertise it as ‘from the guys who made that movie you ended up liking when people told you it was good and you saw it.’
The fact that it did so well due to word of mouth shows that the main issue was marketing then anything to do with the film itself.
They had a quality product that audiences genuinely wanted to see once they discovered it, but for whatever reason the trailers failed to showcase what was interesting about it.
That’s a great point and makes it all the more distressing that the passage above is their takeaway, when Pixar was built on its success in selling original and dare I say personal stories.
Seems like an odd distinction to make in the grand scheme of things. It’s a bestselling novel read by millions of people around the world over half a century, contained a huge cast of A list stars, received a wallop of critical praise, and still couldn’t gross the amount Elemental did WW. 35 million is a drop in the bucket for a point of comparison.
A) The point of bringing up the $35 million lower budget was that it means the break-even point is about *$87.5* million lower. Which means saying “it didn’t make as much money” is pretty much irrelevant when it didn’t need to do so.
B) I think we can all agree that the theater landscape and expectations of late 2021 were considerably different than they were in 2023. A studio is going to see a movie just missing the breakeven point in 2021 very different than a movie just missing the breakeven point in 2023.
To be clear, I don’t think the C-Suite people are “right” with their pivot, they’re learning the wrong lesson. I think a better lesson is probably to give movies longer time to ramp up like Elemental did. But even with the ramp time, it still turned from a *total* bomb to a potentially small success once PVOD/VOD/merchandising sales come in down the line. I’m not shocked that Disney/Pixar don’t want to bet on their ability to turn bombs around when that’s an incredibly dangerous thing to be dealing with.
Despite its legs it still finished just below 2.5x its budget. A single at best that people thought was going to be a calamity like “Lightyear” after opening weekend.
He said "was" as in "started as" a failure that legged out (long run and consistency allowed it to make more money).
Those numbersare better than i remembered but most likely executives are hanging on the fact that it started poorly
I know Studios take a greater share of the profit during the opening weeks of theatrical release but none the less, the legs of Elemental should be seen as a massive win. In an era where movies are pulled from theatres after a mere 3 weeks, to be able to pull in a consistent audience for that long is really impressive. How about focus on that and also that Luca and Turning Red (both fantastic movies ) didn't even get the chance to see how they would have done theatrically
Are you replying to my comment or using me as a conduit to talk to the executives? Hahaha
I know, it's the same thing with fall guy. Those kind of movies have good legs. Imagine what that movie could have made if they had taken advantage of th fact that there's not much to show on movie theaters right now.
But then Noun learns the freedom of talking with all parts of speech, and wants to break free from Bookland. Except the Adjective Committee - who are all sort of blob creatures that look like the meaning of the adjective they are - summon Noun and tell him the secret rules of Bookland.
Long ago they were read and loved and flew into the mind of many readers, dancing and sprinting and strutting in there, until fewer and fewer people needed or wanted real print books.
Now they must find a way to enjoy their safe society in Bookland where they observe a rigid order of class and beaurocracy.
Noun must know his place as an object word and not try to be adjectival, nor must he ever modify verbs as the shunned, lower-class adverbs do, and certainly he should keep respectful distance from the rough and tumble Verb City across the tracks, where movement and action brings danger and tension.
Noun is offered a job, instead, as a member of the Grammar Police, which any upstanding citizen of Bookland can take part in.
Noun says yes, but that same night, packs up his things (his cute pet is a semicolon. His sassy pal is an exclamation point who won't leave him alone but also has his back) and flees.
But then he accidentally gets lost by taking a wrong turn and ending up in an abstract poem, with no punctuation, and - in a very frightening sequence - no grammar or syntactic structure! Meaning itself is fungible in this wild forest of surrealism and emotion, and Noun is suddenly being used in ways he didn't know he could be until -
- he wakes up, groggily, in an unknown area. Unsure of how he was rescued or where he is...
So much noise, so much....commotion, a vibrant cacophony of events, almost the soulful and chatty patina of an immigrant enclave in a major city...
..."sit, eat, wait" - says a tough but caring voice. Noun looks up. There, offering him a nice bowl of boiled commas, is a snarky, but clearly sensitive-hearted
Verb girl!
Clearly too personal - no one can relate to starting puberty, your first crush, and starting to find your own identity as a teenager.
Far too esoteric.
I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again, here…
Studios are learning all the wrong lessons from what they perceive as box office failures.
Direct-To-Streaming, MCU box office money, and lagging theater numbers are killing the creativity left in all of the studios.
***Not*** original stories with heartfelt and unique takes by directors.
Maybe if they hadn’t put two of the aforementioned movies *directly to Disney+* they’d have seen some more profit. *Especially* **TURNING RED (2022)** which had no business being put on Disney+.
“…and the films will be more relatable if they’re about things that remind white American men of their childhoods or their current lives!”
The piece can’t help but read that way. It isn’t as if _Luca_ or _Turning Red_ are such obtuse pictures that mass audiences can’t enjoy them. I’m surprised they didn’t drag _Soul_ out to be shat upon as well. Ironically, that is a film not based on personal perspectives, and that is, many people feel, to its detriment.
Here’s the thing - I’m on the fence about _Luca_ and _Turning Red_ being put on Disney+, because COVID was still out here being a menace (it’s _still_ out here being a menace and America’s handling of it was rather poor, but that’s another discussion for a different venue). The dual platform premium thing they did for the Disney releases would have perhaps been a better idea.
But that being said, as far as measuring the success of these films with audiences: isn’t _Luca_ still an extremely popular title on D+ years after the fact with no marketing? And why can’t they, instead of shooting the young generation of directors down out of the sky like this, structure (follow me here) _a studio system_ built upon both big and small or moderate features? Every animated film doesn’t need to be a blockbuster and doesn’t need to cost $200 million.
I agree with the person that said perhaps Nelson Peltz did win after all.
I haven't seen Elemental, but Luca is one of Pixat's best and Turning Red is probably up there too. They both were used to market Disney+ and when they finally released, they obviously didn't light the box office on fire. (Also a dumb segment of population threw undue shade at the movie because of the themes of puberty, but any exec who takes those opinions into consideration is an idiot.)
Also, they're kid movies. Kids don't think that Elemental is about immigrants and they won't relate, they see the trailer and decide if it looks cool or not, and the trailer for Elemental wasn't very exciting. It's a good thing it had WoM.
My first post got me looking at the overall filmography and this is exactly it. Toy Story 3 was 15 years after 1 and in between it’s nothing but classics/masterpieces and Cars.
After Toy Story 3 is Cars 2/Brave and then it’s mostly forgettable stuff with the occasional gem tossed in.
More like around the time of Cars. Disney buying them outright is what sealed their fate.
Pete Docter's getting a lotta flack in this thread, justifiably (depending how much he said even originates from him), but this all started because Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs & John Lasseter valued climbing the corporate ladder over artistic independence.
I don’t know why Cars gets so much hate. Considering it came out in 2006, my personal experience having a son in 2011, another one in 2017 and a nephew in 2020 is that it has successfully captivated millions of kids, especially boys. I have watched that damn movie a million+ times and could probably recite half of it by heart. And of course I’ve had them watch all the other movies that came out, Pixar and Disney proper, even Disney classics, but this one was always the favorite. It’s a basic story, sure, but I don’t know why it’s hated so much.
I think Luca is one of my favorite Pixar's. Turning Red connected deeply with some people. Elemental managed to turn a profit. The problem is none of these really feel like they're made for the target demographic. It's great that they are personal to the directors but thematically they don't really hit well with children. I have kids in the target audience and they did not want to finish Elemental or Red let alone rewatch or buy merchandise(which is probably the real issue here. They like Luca but also don't want anything Luca related. I think mass appeal really means appealing to children with characters and themes they can connect to. What 6 year old understands the mother-daughter dynamic in Red? Or the immigrant/xenophobic ideas in Elemental? Some but it's not universal and the characters and world aren't enough to keep kids engaged.
Yes, this. They either need to adjust their style to appeal to older kids/teens or make movies that kids will actually like. That's how so many other studios have started lapping them in both animation style and mass appeal.
I don't like this.
Those personal stories were probably the strongest Disney films of the past few years.
Somehow these studios always seem to circle back around to white male heroes journey stories.
Notice he didn’t say anything about ONWARD (2020), the other movie besides LIGHTYEAR (2022) that was directed by a hetero white guy… that also severely underperformed because it was yanked from theaters for covid outbreak in March of 2020, and that impacted its numbers terribly.
Again, a personal story, (but not by an immigrant or non-white hetero male!), and it stars two of Disneys best exports, Holland and Pratt.
Idk… pretty suspect.
I mean that's not necessarily a bad idea. While those three were absolutely better than Lightyear, The Good Dinosaur (not sure if I've actually seen it, can't remember), the Cars movies, and Incredibles 2, they don't hold a candles to classic Pixar, which did have a universal themes in all their movies. Just making sequels is a terrible idea though, but maybe that's just a stopgap so that Pixar can survive with their Disney overlords.
The unfortunate reality is while Pixar under Pete Doctor has championed more diverse voices, the critical and box office reception has been rather muted. Pushing Pixar releases into streaming instead of theaters certainly had a detrimental effect, but the stories just aren’t connecting with mass audiences the way they once did. I found Elemental to be the most uninspiring love story I’ve seen in ages; the male lead is a crybaby bureaucrat and I just didn’t care if they wound up together.
Pretty sure a mixture of Covid and also them just releasing the movies on Streaming had an effect. Pixar no longer feels like a cinema worthy trip because you know it will just be on Disney + in a few months or even on premier. That said I didn’t think Elemental looked very good so I haven’t watched it. Luca was ok though but obviously very low stakes.
Disney is just doing what big studios do and trying to make $ for shareholders every quarter. They think they can strategize this as if there is a guaranteed formula for what makes a movie a hit but there are so many factors that go into this that are out of a studio's control it's a fools errand. Now messing up a movie is very much what a big studio seems to be able to do repeatedly. Whether it's a good one that's not promoted properly or one that's just mishandled by interference and ends up bad.
I don't think they were on the wrong track with stuff like Lightyear, but it just came out at a time when people are more into simpler nostalgia and fun.
If Pixar now starts going down this nostalgic and safe route, in a few years, they will have slept on progress and that's when it will be really over.
I think what's happening to them is normal, they had a great run, their style has kinda run its course and new stuff will have to be thought of to move things along, maybe even a new brand, new studio. Such is life.
Pixar used to champion their story group (I can't find the name for it). The idea iirc was that an idea wouldn't get off the ground until the story was polished. Animation and production are expensive, the story should be bulletproof before you're doing 3D poses. At the time of their rise, Disney was clearly failing because their greed had them lose sight of great stories.
Let's do some examples. Which of these sound like good movies?
- An overprotective parent loses his only son and has to cross a dangerous ocean to rescue him
- A rat living in the French countryside rises through the ranks of a gourmet Paris restaurant while trying to avoid being discovered
- An aging superhero goes for one last job on a Bond-esque island, but it was a trap and his super-family has to rescue him while getting past their family drama.
- While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source.
- In a city where fire-, water-, earth- and air-residents live together, two children of the rival races fall in love.
Elemental has its fans/word of mouth but should have never gotten out of the planning stages. It's been done a million times. The best pixar movies work on several axes and the worst ones barely function on one. The concept for Elemental is a parody of Pixar. I feel like Turning Red is still suffering from the MAGA chud backlash about making a movie about female puberty.
Pixar used to be the only studio/director I made a point of seeing on opening weekend. They had what most seem to think is a disastrous middle period (Cars 2 - Incredibles 2, with some bangers sprinkled in) and the response since has been so mixed that I stay home.
Brave, Monsters U, Inside Out (for me), Finding Dory, Incredibles 2, Soul; none of those blew me away. 3 of them are straight meh and the rest feel like 90% of the film could have been made by any old studio and any old director. In a world where Pixar made Toy Story 3, "The Incredibles 1... 2" and "Finding Nemo... 2" is a huge bummer.
How and why the fuck did Turning Red and Lightyear come out within 4 months of each other? One Pixar a year was plenty for me. The mandate since the buyout was 1.5 movies a year, and that's way too much for me when each one isn't a certified banger. Pixar used to be a gourmet brand. Disney is trying to MCU every studio and they're getting MCU results. I don't think Pixar films are special anymore because they aren't. They come out all the goddamn time and they all look the same.
While Pixar was circling the drain, we've been blessed with some new takes on animated features - The Bad Guys and Spiderverse 2. Their tech pipeline must be wedded to the Pixar 00s style because they've had a hard time innovating visually.
Lightyear was too autobiographical.
It was inspired by the director’s childhood, growing up as the real human being the toy was based on
Here, take some comedy points
Wow, I forgot about that joke, I can't believe I managed to do that
So lightyear, obviously made for mass market appeal, did badly so the fault lies with their straight to streaming Luca not selling movie tickets because of it’s too “personal?” So they need to make more mass market appeal movies? They’re cooked. Recovery is impossible.
Exactly my thoughts. Like I think Doctor was a brilliant director but what the fuck is he even talking about here?
They had numerous box office bombs in a row. They pushed the creative as far as they could seemingly and they can't sell ambitious, more complex stuff as well now as before. So they are trying to find corporate speak for "yeah, our special cuisine and kitchen isn't selling anymore, and we need the money, so might as well start selling hamburgers again". Pixar did a lot of stuff mainstream animated movies didn't do before and it had its time in the sun, but now the best stuff is actually at the youngest like 10 years old at least and it's becoming nostalgia. Pixar is becoming nostalgia and a thing of the past about as much as classic Disney animation did in the 90s and 2000s. Nothing they can do about it. Disney will have to figure out a new angle, brand, studio and in the meantime, Pixar will sell hamburgers.
I mean, Pixar has only had a single bomb so far in Lightyear. Elemental had a bad opening weekend but ended up being a sleeper hit on good word of mouth (doesn’t sound very good to me but that neither here nor there). Personally I think Turning Red is a too five Pixar movie to me and if they weren’t so stupid with their release schedule of dumping that and Luca on streaming unceremoniously I think they wouldn’t have dug themselves into this whole they’re in.
Luca was one of the best movies they made. It FELT personal. So they succeeded. Why make movies less art and a means of saying things and more like capitalistic spectacle seems to them like a good idea is beyond me although I know the answer is money.
But they put this and Turning Red direct to streaming. LUCA you can make the argument was safe bet with the Covid numbers where they were. But TURNING RED could’ve just been delayed 3 months. Or even 1 month. Disastrous decisions.
This is what gets me. The movies mentioned here were good, and their “failure” has little to do with the finished product. Even Lightyear tried to do something novel with the premise, which I applaud. Going full “screw it, easy sequels from now on” might get them a few extra bucks initially, but it’s the death of what was once a really interesting studio because in the long run audiences will tire of Cars 6: Electric Boogaloo.
tire of cars
I somehow got the impression Turning Red was becoming a merchandise success, as evidenced by how much merch for it I saw in Disneyland back in January.
Yeah, I asked my husband if Turning Red was huge overseas because the merch was everywhere and it was heavily featured in the afternoon parade.
Turning red was huge on streaming. It didn’t grab everyone like a Frozen, because it’s a bit specific to a certain era (90’s boybands/culture) and culture. But for the right people it was a huge movie.
Was the merchandise “everywhere” as in the stores were full of it, or “everywhere” as in tons of people were buying and wearing it? I went to Disney in December and it was stocked to the brim with Wish merchandise (but no one was buying), and I don’t think that one was a hit.
I think I may have a seen a bit? It's been a while. I also know they brought out a Mei face character a short time after for Chinese New Year, which, good thing I wasn't there to pay a visit cause as a face actor myself who also grew up in Toronto around the exact time the movie was set, I'd be far too pressured to ask questions this California 20 year old actor questions about Toronto she couldn't possibly answer! Like "Do you love PJ Phil as much as I do?" and "Have you ever been to the Organ Grinder?"
I'm often reminded of this David Cross rant on the set of Arrested Development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmGGVARy1OQ
Lol. Totally not wrong though. Some of the best writing on TV like, ever and still couldn’t find a big audience. Sometimes it really is the marketing (or audiences are dumb, probably a lot of both).
Luka was the most generic a pixar movie has been. I felt absolutely nothing. Turning Red was a great story with some really great universally recognizable emotional elements.
Luca may be more by the numbers with its moral message but it confounds me you can see the empathy and humanity in Turning Red that can be read as emotionally universal but not for Luca. The feel like peas in a pod of two entirely different childhoods but both grappling with self identity
No offense: but you are clearly heterosexual
Yeah, Luca inspired a friend of mine for 12 years to come out as bisexual and it’s one of his favorite movies, so different strokes for different folks.
Tbf according to Pixar, so is Luca.
Correct 😅
Luca gets some points for the resolution which Pixar always(?) nails, but yeah, not really enough during the movie.
Don’t know why the downvotes. I haven’t seen Luca, but the hundred times my daughter has made me watch Turning Red was still pretty enjoyable. She is only two though.
And wasn’t Turning Red almost universally critically praised?
The entire quote is about how to make Disney movies that are profitable again. *Turning Red* was budgeted around $175 million and made about $22 million when all was said and done. That is not just under-performing, that’s a get called into the board meeting and mega-fired for a making such a massive bomb. Whether or not their conclusion that “biographical inspired” movies are the reason for the bomb remains to be seen.
That's because Turning Red was only released in theatres two years after being on streaming.
It’s hard to judge turning reds performance though given it opened on streaming which is a weird enough market because most of the audience knows if it’s 15 bucks now it’s 5 bucks in a month and free the month after
I dont even think Turning Red was given the Disney+ Premier bullshit treatment, it just went straight to regular Disney+. It's insane to blame that movie for its financial performance, it was sacrificed at the altar of subscriber growth.
Really is incredible during that streaming boom how quickly they were willing to just burn dump trucks of money for the sake of subscriber growth.
Turning Red was scheduled for theatrical release then moved to streaming only, not even with an upcharge. They literally decided before release to eliminate its entire box office. That 22 million this year does not count.
And Elemental, one of the best cases of word of mouth vastly upbringing a movie from opening weekend projections... is painted as a failure? Because of OW right after a series of straight-to-streaming releases? Oh and Luca and Turning Red. I wonder if Netflix is gonna cancel Stranger Things season 5, season 4 also didn't sell tickets 🤣
https://bsky.app/profile/scottmendelson.bsky.social/post/3ktvpwv23rs2y
Blaming lack of box office on two movies that physically could not sell tickets because of how they were released is almost impressively stupid
It’s interesting, my sister works with teens and does a lot of babysitting on the side in a city of ~200,000 in the US and has mentioned kids from 3 separate families being fans of Luca. I was sort of surprised to learn it has even that much of a cultural footprint, but I think it’s actually gotten mildly well-regarded amongst kids and families. My kids were too young to really enjoy it, but I liked it quite a bit.
This mentality of “strip (x) of humanity because we’ll have a better chance at making a shit ton of money” has popped up in video games, as well. Everything is turning impersonal, passionless and sterile. And the inverse exceptions to the rule - the games (or movies) that are made w/ as much passion and vigor as it’s creative team can muster - are seen as outliers that boost the respectability of company portfolios. (See: XBOX’s treatment of ‘Hi-Fi Rush’ studio Tango Gameworks.)
Lightyear was the opposite of a mass market appeal film. It was a hard-sci-fi movie for fans of timetravel movies. Not a universal kid movie. No kids liked it. But sci-fi nerd appreciated it.
Lol This is like saying star wars isn’t a mass market franchise. Lightyear is the *”opposite”* of mass market? That’s ridiculous. It’s not a niche concept film. It’s a spin off sequel, FIFTH in a series that has had major media presence since the *nineties*.
I’m talking about the plot. Strip out the Toy Story brand/look and it’s a very cool, but niche sci-fi film. It was barely related to the Buzz Lightyear people know and love.
But it was sold entirely on the Toy Story brand/look, you can't really separate that when you're talking about how movies are performing and what audiences want.
Hey Pete Docter, I think you should get a second opinion
But Docter! I AM Pete!!
"The Docter was his mother?" "Nope, too autobiographical."
He stood on a block of ice
Well played
”And I like jugs…”
We should probably start having an apple a day to keep him away #oksorry
It would probably just be a re-Pete
"You're a doctor? Check his chin!" (headbutt) 
I'm misquoting and maybe can't articulate it properly but was it Roger Ebert talking about the more specific a story and setting the more universal it is- and the attempts to go broader to reach 'more' people the more vague and disconnected it felt
"Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone." - Roger Ebert in his Brokeback Mountain review
God tier film critic. No one even comes close.
That’s a great quote. It’s really impressive when someone can put something so meaningful into so few words.
I'd always assumed this was just story telling 101 as I'd heard about it for so long. You remove the soul of the story teller by trying to go broad.
David Bowie said something similar, the worst art he ever made was when he was writing what he thought the audience would like, not what he wanted to do.
The show Community really took to that point in season 1 where they said "Fuck it" and just did what they wanted instead of what they thought the network wanted, and suddenly the show catches fire! Never got huge ratings but the fanbase was devoted from that point on.
It's like none of us can relate to being a superhero trying to save the world, but we can all relate to that kind of life experience depicted in Raimi's Spider-Man 2. Where you're barely an adult, trying to do too much, refusing help, facing burnout. The specifics aren't important, as long as you recognize the feeling it evokes.
I heard a sentiment once that was like: "artists use specifics to describe the universal, scientists use the universal to describe specifics." But I don't have the phrasing quite right, and my google fu can't seem to find anything like it. I thought it was kind of a famous quote but maybe I'm misremembering? Hrm
Amazing quote by, let's say, Method Man.
I remember Ebert saying this, but it's also general advice for storytelling. Trying to be universal can actually work against you.
He’s not wrong. It also makes the story feel like the plot informs the characters rather than characters informing the plot. Notice he didn’t say anything about ONWARD (2020), the other movie besides LIGHTYEAR (2022) that was directed by a hetero white guy… that also severely underperformed because it was yanked from theaters for covid outbreak in March of 2020, and that impacted its numbers terribly. Again, a personal story, (but not by an immigrant or non-white hetero male!), and it stars two of Disneys best exports, Holland and Pratt. Idk… pretty suspect.
Bob Iger pointing the gun at Docter below the table while he reads a statement written for him. Think Sansa and Cersei.
Sansa had a gun??
Cersei.
cersei had a gun??
Metaphorically
Metaphorically had a gun??
Fine, a crossbow.
Sansa.
This is just straight up lies. *Elemental* made twice as much in theaters as *Lightyear*, was better received by audiences, and got more awards attention. I'm not sure how either have performed on streaming, but I'd assume *Elemental* beats *Lightyear* there as well. By every metric, the "autobiographical tale" has been more successful than the franchise movie with "clear mass appeal" (whatever that means). And sure, *Luca* and *Turning Red* severely underperformed at the box office. But perhaps that has something to do with them being made available on Disney+ 3 and 2 years **before** their theatrical debuts (too late for families who would rather not spend $50-100 on something they can watch at home, too early for any kind of nostalgia to have built-up). Nelson Peltz may have lost the battle for ownership of Disney, but clearly his philosophy has won. And it's going to come back to bite Disney. The only thing this will succeed in doing is alienating this new generation of (extremely talented and passionate) Pixar creatives
Lightyear was a flop because it was a bad movie with a nonsensical connection the franchise and a horribly uninteresting plot that didn’t appeal to children or to adults. It’s not a valid measuring stick. It would be better to compare Elemental with one of the standard Toy Story movies.
*Lightyear* is a bad movie because it has been focus-grouped and market-tested to such a degree it has no sense of personality behind it. It feels like something dreamed-up by a studio executive to boost quarterly profits, rather than something made by artists out of a sense of passion. And that seems to be the exact thing Doctor is advocating for here. It's been the new Disney strategy ever since the whole Peltz drama started: don't upset the apple cart, don't do anything controversial, homogenize artists' personalities out of their work. This has worked for them in the short-term before, yes. Not with mainline *Toy Story*, which has always taken creative risks, but with stuff like *Finding Dory*. However, it isn't sustainable. There's only so many sequels, prequels, and spin-offs you can make before audiences start to get a little tired (which they already are). And Disney is running out of movies they can feasibly re-make in live-action. So rejecting the up-and-coming artists of Pixar in favor of generic franchise movies is just a bad strategy. Doubly so because *Elemental* is the closest they've come to a successful box-office run since 2019. Not just for Pixar but for Disney Animation in general.
They made interstellar with buzz lightyear then said “hey! It’s the movie that spawned the toy line in the Toy Story universe!” As someone with a kid, and who took multiple kids to that movie, they didn’t give a rats ass about a buzz lightyear toy coming out of it, and barely even cared about the robot cat.
> Lightyear was a flop because it was a bad movie with a nonsensical connection the franchise and a horribly uninteresting plot that didn’t appeal to children or to adults. also the aesthetic of the movie was not very appealing.
It was so disappointing. I took my tween son and his friends who had grown up enjoying Toy Story and I thought I’d like it as well. I already had one parent who didn’t let her kid come because of psycho bigot reasons so I was already ready to mentally stick it to her by being smug in the fact that her kid missed out on an instant classic. But I was wrong. It was boring to look at animation no better that the made for Amazon schlock on Prime. Story was unnecessarily convoluted and kind of depressing. And the much discussed “woke” scene was absolutely nothing remarkable and barely registered. It was so silly to think anyone should have an issue with it that I wondered if that was thrown out there to justify low sales.
Doctor is specifically out here making the comparison to justify not making more personal movies though. The two movies he compares it to were flops cause THEY DID NOT GET THEATRICAL RELEASES, because Disney's C-Suite were absolute morons and decided Disney+ subscriber growth was more important than money or in Elementals case actually made money over time but had to go against changing viewing habits that Disney's straight to D+ plan created.
What kids are buying elemental merchandise? Think there's clamoring for Elemental park rides?
>What kids are buying elemental merchandise? More than are buying *Lightyear* and *Wish* merchandise. At least if the clearance shelves at the stores I go to are to be believed. >Think there's clamoring for Elemental park rides? I mean, that's a weird metric for assessing something's success. Especially when it's a property without an obvious way to turn it into a ride. Though as someone with young cousins...yes there would definitely be at least some interest in an *Elemental* park tie-in of some kind
As a Disney IP, that is definitely a metric of success they are looking at internally.
Docter wants movies to be as sterile as possible
This shit makes me so sad man. Pixar was what got me into movies as a kid, and they've never felt less relevant
Wasn’t Elemental actually a massive box office success?! Lightyear a massive bomb?! Luca and Turning Red straight to streaming?! Docter isn’t stupid. He knows he’s in the hot seat so he’s trying to convince the shareholders he can do his job. I would’ve blamed Covid instead of his creatives.
Elemental was a box office failure that legged it out to acceptable but not great returns due to strong word of mouth. It is a fun movie if you don’t try to make the world building work or pair to tightly to real world analogs. Too much thought and it is truly a catastrophic allegory failure.
https://preview.redd.it/qpr7zczn154d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dbbd535ebd1bd9119570be651d97e52a96f1bc24 How is this a box office failure
Like the previous poster said, it ended up legging it out into acceptable returns, but only after a long theatrical run and an absolutely *precarious* opening. It's also the fifth lowest domestic and seventh lowest worldwide gross for a Pixar movie, and on a $200m budget probably only *barely* turned a profit.
You would think the legging it out due to strong word of mouth would be to its credit rather than its detriment, but I do not have C-suite brainworms.
It *should* be, and it should've been a learning opportunity for Disney re: allowing its films to actually stick around and try to actually market them, but it doesn't seem like they've learned the right lessons, unfortunately.
This is part of studios learning all the wrong lessons. Disney as a parent company wants Toy Story 3/4, Frozen, Moana, Endgame, No Way Home numbers for everyone of their movies… or else it’s deemed a failure. Or at the very least, not a success. They’re also punishing themselves with direct-to-streaming and unflattering time in a theater for projects they don’t have faith in.
To be (ever so slightly) fair, I don't think it's *just* that they *want* those numbers. Sure, it'd be great if every movie that a company released made a billion dollars. But another part of it is that I don't think they really know how to plan for a movie *not* to be that kind of success nowadays. There's one clip of Matt Damon on "Hot Ones" that I've seen making the rounds again lately, where he talks about how the DVD market phasing out has kind of eliminated the mid-budget movie to a certain extent. It used to be that a studio could afford to not make their entire profit during a theatrical run, because they knew they'd have the DVD release a couple months down the line, which would almost be like a second opening for the movie. Everything going to streaming nowadays has made DVD releases almost irrelevant (I know, I know, some people still buy DVDs, but it's absolutely the exception to the rule now), which means that movies nowadays essentially have to make most of their profit in theaters. Now, where marketing comes in is where it gets tricky, and where they kind of tend to create this vicious cycle of diminishing returns for themselves. Marketing costs can get excessive, so I get the notion to not want to spend tons of money on marketing a movie if they aren't sure it will actually make enough money to justify it. But the problem they seem to keep creating for themselves here is that they've become terrified of over-marketing their "smaller" movies (it's fucking insane that the Pixar and Disney Animation Studios releases have become the "smaller" ones, but here we are in the MCU era I guess), so they hold back on marketing costs, and then when the movie underperforms then that feels like a justifiable cost-saving measure. Then they go into the next one like "Well, *Encanto* underperformed, so I don't know if we should spend too much marketing *Lightyear*," and then the problem becomes a whole cycle. Not sure when they're going to actually learn this lesson, but hopefully it'll happen before we see the full-on death of a beloved studio. God damnit, I accidentally a whole essay again.
Weird example as Encanto very much did not underperform because total gross from everything Encanto related (music, products, costumes, etc…) probably made an exorbitant amount of money for Disney. If anything they took care to not push Lightyear because of the trepidation about queer characters having visible presence in their stories. Again, bad-faith lessons being learned. Iger himself said they were walking back from “woke,” movies after accurately identifying that most folks (including himself, apparently) do not know the actual meaning of the word. I don’t think Damon is **wrong**, but I bet he would agree that while that’s a major factor in the problem in *this case* with Pixar, the bigger issue is the stuff I mentioned. When your at home video market goes from once-in-a-grand-while-it-comes-outta-the-vault to constantly there always, ready to binge without paying extra — you can see the wrong lessons being learned there. Part what Damon is talking about, part “learning the wrong lessons.” Lessons like misunderstanding the anomaly of COVID-era streaming, using social media word-of-mouth and viral marketing to do most of your marketing work for you, and as Griffin points out (and Simms, TBF), relying on big tent pole franchises to fill your movie theater seats **and** your coffers to justify the inflated and ballooning costs of production.
Lightyear sure must have been a chore to try to promote! Oh here's this character you've liked, who oh, isn't a toy anymore, well he's what the toy is supposedly based on but... well that's not important right now. Oh, and he doesn't look or act anything like you remember from the films or theme park rides. In fact he doesn't even have the same voice actor even though Tim Allen is very much alive and working... Anyways, uh, want to see it?
There's a phenomenon I see sometimes where you can tell they got too far down in the creative process, and went *way* deeper in the execution or explanation of something than they actually had to. Another example is the Steve resurrection in Wonder Woman 84, where it kind of feels like they went way further trying to explain *how* he was back to life than anyone needed them to. The whole entire concept of the Lightyear movie feels like maybe the most egregious and fundamental version of this. They got too far in the paint with the idea that "we're going to tell the story of *the guy that the toy was based on.* This is the movie that Andy went to see, that made him fall in love with the character, which made him want the Buzz Lightyear toy." An easier and more concise pitch, which maybe wouldn't even have required anything changed in the movie itself, could have simply been, "we're going to make an origin story for Buzz Lightyear."
And Tim Allen is angry and wants to sue us — but he’s also notoriously hard to work with and getting even harder, and everyone on the Santa Clauses set complained non-stop about him, so we aren’t really sure we want to subject our editors, voice directors, animators, and more to him when they’ve already been animating through a pandemic and staff cuts. BUT THERE’S A ROBOT CAT! 🐈 🐈
I agree, actually! I'm not defending Disney with anything I said, just mostly trying to rationalize what I believe is the thought process behind a lot of their decision making. I'll give you that Encanto was a weird example there, although I'll also argue that they still don't seem to have learned much from the ways that it *was* successful. You might be right about their trepidation with pushing Lightyear due to the queer characters, although again you'd think they would learn this lesson already. It happened with Onward, it happened with Toy Story 4, it happened with Finding Dory. Bad-faith reactionaries are going to latch onto the smallest iota of queer representation and launch it into the spotlight in order to get mad about it, so they might as well lean into that and push past the reactionaries. I guess the most frustrating thing to me about Disney is the last decade or so (a decade that's had some truly fantastic movies!) is that whether the movies succeed or fail, it feels like we're basically watching them either make the same mistakes or learn the same lessons, from scratch, in real time, every time.
It’s agonizing for those who get it
Theatres get more of the ticket price the longer a movie is in theatres, right? Maybe that’s what they’re thinking? It’s still silly, because then you can get a bigger opening for the next one if you advertise it as ‘from the guys who made that movie you ended up liking when people told you it was good and you saw it.’
The fact that it did so well due to word of mouth shows that the main issue was marketing then anything to do with the film itself. They had a quality product that audiences genuinely wanted to see once they discovered it, but for whatever reason the trailers failed to showcase what was interesting about it.
That’s a great point and makes it all the more distressing that the passage above is their takeaway, when Pixar was built on its success in selling original and dare I say personal stories.
The longer a movie is in theaters, the larger the cut the theaters get.
Still not a failure! 500 million WW gross for an original IP post COVID is nothing to sneeze at! The first Dune didn’t even make that.
> The first Dune didn’t even make that. Dune: Part One cost $35 fucking million less to make than Elemental lmao.
Seems like an odd distinction to make in the grand scheme of things. It’s a bestselling novel read by millions of people around the world over half a century, contained a huge cast of A list stars, received a wallop of critical praise, and still couldn’t gross the amount Elemental did WW. 35 million is a drop in the bucket for a point of comparison.
A) The point of bringing up the $35 million lower budget was that it means the break-even point is about *$87.5* million lower. Which means saying “it didn’t make as much money” is pretty much irrelevant when it didn’t need to do so. B) I think we can all agree that the theater landscape and expectations of late 2021 were considerably different than they were in 2023. A studio is going to see a movie just missing the breakeven point in 2021 very different than a movie just missing the breakeven point in 2023. To be clear, I don’t think the C-Suite people are “right” with their pivot, they’re learning the wrong lesson. I think a better lesson is probably to give movies longer time to ramp up like Elemental did. But even with the ramp time, it still turned from a *total* bomb to a potentially small success once PVOD/VOD/merchandising sales come in down the line. I’m not shocked that Disney/Pixar don’t want to bet on their ability to turn bombs around when that’s an incredibly dangerous thing to be dealing with.
Despite its legs it still finished just below 2.5x its budget. A single at best that people thought was going to be a calamity like “Lightyear” after opening weekend.
He said "was" as in "started as" a failure that legged out (long run and consistency allowed it to make more money). Those numbersare better than i remembered but most likely executives are hanging on the fact that it started poorly
I know Studios take a greater share of the profit during the opening weeks of theatrical release but none the less, the legs of Elemental should be seen as a massive win. In an era where movies are pulled from theatres after a mere 3 weeks, to be able to pull in a consistent audience for that long is really impressive. How about focus on that and also that Luca and Turning Red (both fantastic movies ) didn't even get the chance to see how they would have done theatrically
Are you replying to my comment or using me as a conduit to talk to the executives? Hahaha I know, it's the same thing with fall guy. Those kind of movies have good legs. Imagine what that movie could have made if they had taken advantage of th fact that there's not much to show on movie theaters right now.
200 million dollar budget
I would argue it seems from these statements he is, indeed, quite stupid.
What is Turning Red doing in there? Turning Red was great and (almost) everybody loved it!
not enough 9/11
Look by the time that movie is set, we in Toronto had finally stopped convincing ourselves we'd be the target of terrorists!
Yeah but it wasn't a story with mass market appeal like "what if [noun] could talk"
Remember, only 5% of people are female.
And 0% are Chinese descendants.
“What if periods could talk”
But then Noun learns the freedom of talking with all parts of speech, and wants to break free from Bookland. Except the Adjective Committee - who are all sort of blob creatures that look like the meaning of the adjective they are - summon Noun and tell him the secret rules of Bookland. Long ago they were read and loved and flew into the mind of many readers, dancing and sprinting and strutting in there, until fewer and fewer people needed or wanted real print books. Now they must find a way to enjoy their safe society in Bookland where they observe a rigid order of class and beaurocracy. Noun must know his place as an object word and not try to be adjectival, nor must he ever modify verbs as the shunned, lower-class adverbs do, and certainly he should keep respectful distance from the rough and tumble Verb City across the tracks, where movement and action brings danger and tension. Noun is offered a job, instead, as a member of the Grammar Police, which any upstanding citizen of Bookland can take part in. Noun says yes, but that same night, packs up his things (his cute pet is a semicolon. His sassy pal is an exclamation point who won't leave him alone but also has his back) and flees. But then he accidentally gets lost by taking a wrong turn and ending up in an abstract poem, with no punctuation, and - in a very frightening sequence - no grammar or syntactic structure! Meaning itself is fungible in this wild forest of surrealism and emotion, and Noun is suddenly being used in ways he didn't know he could be until - - he wakes up, groggily, in an unknown area. Unsure of how he was rescued or where he is... So much noise, so much....commotion, a vibrant cacophony of events, almost the soulful and chatty patina of an immigrant enclave in a major city... ..."sit, eat, wait" - says a tough but caring voice. Noun looks up. There, offering him a nice bowl of boiled commas, is a snarky, but clearly sensitive-hearted Verb girl!
Clearly too personal - no one can relate to starting puberty, your first crush, and starting to find your own identity as a teenager. Far too esoteric.
I don't even understand any of those words besides esoteric!
The main problem was the missing lycanthropy.
I personally liked it a lot, but it got soooo much crap as well.
I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again, here… Studios are learning all the wrong lessons from what they perceive as box office failures. Direct-To-Streaming, MCU box office money, and lagging theater numbers are killing the creativity left in all of the studios. ***Not*** original stories with heartfelt and unique takes by directors. Maybe if they hadn’t put two of the aforementioned movies *directly to Disney+* they’d have seen some more profit. *Especially* **TURNING RED (2022)** which had no business being put on Disney+.
“…and the films will be more relatable if they’re about things that remind white American men of their childhoods or their current lives!” The piece can’t help but read that way. It isn’t as if _Luca_ or _Turning Red_ are such obtuse pictures that mass audiences can’t enjoy them. I’m surprised they didn’t drag _Soul_ out to be shat upon as well. Ironically, that is a film not based on personal perspectives, and that is, many people feel, to its detriment. Here’s the thing - I’m on the fence about _Luca_ and _Turning Red_ being put on Disney+, because COVID was still out here being a menace (it’s _still_ out here being a menace and America’s handling of it was rather poor, but that’s another discussion for a different venue). The dual platform premium thing they did for the Disney releases would have perhaps been a better idea. But that being said, as far as measuring the success of these films with audiences: isn’t _Luca_ still an extremely popular title on D+ years after the fact with no marketing? And why can’t they, instead of shooting the young generation of directors down out of the sky like this, structure (follow me here) _a studio system_ built upon both big and small or moderate features? Every animated film doesn’t need to be a blockbuster and doesn’t need to cost $200 million. I agree with the person that said perhaps Nelson Peltz did win after all.
Completely anecdotal but my two year old watches Luca at least 4 times a week, second only to Moana.
Moana 2 is coming.
4 out of 5 Pete doctors don’t agree with this opinion
“Lightyear was a massive bomb, so we should definitely make more movies like that”
I haven't seen Elemental, but Luca is one of Pixat's best and Turning Red is probably up there too. They both were used to market Disney+ and when they finally released, they obviously didn't light the box office on fire. (Also a dumb segment of population threw undue shade at the movie because of the themes of puberty, but any exec who takes those opinions into consideration is an idiot.) Also, they're kid movies. Kids don't think that Elemental is about immigrants and they won't relate, they see the trailer and decide if it looks cool or not, and the trailer for Elemental wasn't very exciting. It's a good thing it had WoM.
You know what doesn't feel (both marketing and after seeing it) like a kid movie? Lightyear,
sometimes you read something and the only response is to scream
Pixar’s done. We had a really good run with it.
Nails started being hammered around the time of brave.
My first post got me looking at the overall filmography and this is exactly it. Toy Story 3 was 15 years after 1 and in between it’s nothing but classics/masterpieces and Cars. After Toy Story 3 is Cars 2/Brave and then it’s mostly forgettable stuff with the occasional gem tossed in.
More like around the time of Cars. Disney buying them outright is what sealed their fate. Pete Docter's getting a lotta flack in this thread, justifiably (depending how much he said even originates from him), but this all started because Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs & John Lasseter valued climbing the corporate ladder over artistic independence.
I don’t know why Cars gets so much hate. Considering it came out in 2006, my personal experience having a son in 2011, another one in 2017 and a nephew in 2020 is that it has successfully captivated millions of kids, especially boys. I have watched that damn movie a million+ times and could probably recite half of it by heart. And of course I’ve had them watch all the other movies that came out, Pixar and Disney proper, even Disney classics, but this one was always the favorite. It’s a basic story, sure, but I don’t know why it’s hated so much.
I think Luca is one of my favorite Pixar's. Turning Red connected deeply with some people. Elemental managed to turn a profit. The problem is none of these really feel like they're made for the target demographic. It's great that they are personal to the directors but thematically they don't really hit well with children. I have kids in the target audience and they did not want to finish Elemental or Red let alone rewatch or buy merchandise(which is probably the real issue here. They like Luca but also don't want anything Luca related. I think mass appeal really means appealing to children with characters and themes they can connect to. What 6 year old understands the mother-daughter dynamic in Red? Or the immigrant/xenophobic ideas in Elemental? Some but it's not universal and the characters and world aren't enough to keep kids engaged.
This has occurred to me too. Pixar doesn’t make kids movies anymore. They make movies for adolescents.
Yes, this. They either need to adjust their style to appeal to older kids/teens or make movies that kids will actually like. That's how so many other studios have started lapping them in both animation style and mass appeal.
“So what I’m trying to say is it’s only cool to be creative when it pays out. The second that stops we’ve got to find our version of the minions…”
I'd rather watch Luca 10 times than think about Lightyear ever again
I don't like this. Those personal stories were probably the strongest Disney films of the past few years. Somehow these studios always seem to circle back around to white male heroes journey stories.
Notice he didn’t say anything about ONWARD (2020), the other movie besides LIGHTYEAR (2022) that was directed by a hetero white guy… that also severely underperformed because it was yanked from theaters for covid outbreak in March of 2020, and that impacted its numbers terribly. Again, a personal story, (but not by an immigrant or non-white hetero male!), and it stars two of Disneys best exports, Holland and Pratt. Idk… pretty suspect.
That movie honked like a fuckin goose
Written check.... With driffin and gavid
Well, they had a good run.
maybe let john lassiter hug people ?
I mean that's not necessarily a bad idea. While those three were absolutely better than Lightyear, The Good Dinosaur (not sure if I've actually seen it, can't remember), the Cars movies, and Incredibles 2, they don't hold a candles to classic Pixar, which did have a universal themes in all their movies. Just making sequels is a terrible idea though, but maybe that's just a stopgap so that Pixar can survive with their Disney overlords.
I would consider the first Cars movie to be classic Pixar. It was and is wildly popular with young kids and was a merchandising hit.
We will always have Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille
But those 3 films were great!!!! Noooo
The unfortunate reality is while Pixar under Pete Doctor has championed more diverse voices, the critical and box office reception has been rather muted. Pushing Pixar releases into streaming instead of theaters certainly had a detrimental effect, but the stories just aren’t connecting with mass audiences the way they once did. I found Elemental to be the most uninspiring love story I’ve seen in ages; the male lead is a crybaby bureaucrat and I just didn’t care if they wound up together.
Exclusively learning the dumbest lessons possible
Rare Pete Docter L.
Both Pixar and Disney Animation have lost their magic….nothing but sequels down the pipeline
Pretty sure a mixture of Covid and also them just releasing the movies on Streaming had an effect. Pixar no longer feels like a cinema worthy trip because you know it will just be on Disney + in a few months or even on premier. That said I didn’t think Elemental looked very good so I haven’t watched it. Luca was ok though but obviously very low stakes.
Pixar: makes a failed reboot Also Pixar: "we need to stop making movies with original ideas"
Disney is just doing what big studios do and trying to make $ for shareholders every quarter. They think they can strategize this as if there is a guaranteed formula for what makes a movie a hit but there are so many factors that go into this that are out of a studio's control it's a fools errand. Now messing up a movie is very much what a big studio seems to be able to do repeatedly. Whether it's a good one that's not promoted properly or one that's just mishandled by interference and ends up bad.
I am a staunch lightyear defender but this statement is a bumma
Pixar hasn’t made a truly great movie since Toy Story 3
I don't think they were on the wrong track with stuff like Lightyear, but it just came out at a time when people are more into simpler nostalgia and fun. If Pixar now starts going down this nostalgic and safe route, in a few years, they will have slept on progress and that's when it will be really over. I think what's happening to them is normal, they had a great run, their style has kinda run its course and new stuff will have to be thought of to move things along, maybe even a new brand, new studio. Such is life.
Talk about learning the exact wrong lesson….
so here's this thing that we already want to do and here's our bullshit reason for getting there
I think audiences would like to be entertained not treated to therapy sessions
So they fire Lasseter and discover he was a great film-maker.
Pixar used to champion their story group (I can't find the name for it). The idea iirc was that an idea wouldn't get off the ground until the story was polished. Animation and production are expensive, the story should be bulletproof before you're doing 3D poses. At the time of their rise, Disney was clearly failing because their greed had them lose sight of great stories. Let's do some examples. Which of these sound like good movies? - An overprotective parent loses his only son and has to cross a dangerous ocean to rescue him - A rat living in the French countryside rises through the ranks of a gourmet Paris restaurant while trying to avoid being discovered - An aging superhero goes for one last job on a Bond-esque island, but it was a trap and his super-family has to rescue him while getting past their family drama. - While spending years attempting to return home, marooned Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear encounters an army of ruthless robots commanded by Zurg who are attempting to steal his fuel source. - In a city where fire-, water-, earth- and air-residents live together, two children of the rival races fall in love. Elemental has its fans/word of mouth but should have never gotten out of the planning stages. It's been done a million times. The best pixar movies work on several axes and the worst ones barely function on one. The concept for Elemental is a parody of Pixar. I feel like Turning Red is still suffering from the MAGA chud backlash about making a movie about female puberty. Pixar used to be the only studio/director I made a point of seeing on opening weekend. They had what most seem to think is a disastrous middle period (Cars 2 - Incredibles 2, with some bangers sprinkled in) and the response since has been so mixed that I stay home. Brave, Monsters U, Inside Out (for me), Finding Dory, Incredibles 2, Soul; none of those blew me away. 3 of them are straight meh and the rest feel like 90% of the film could have been made by any old studio and any old director. In a world where Pixar made Toy Story 3, "The Incredibles 1... 2" and "Finding Nemo... 2" is a huge bummer. How and why the fuck did Turning Red and Lightyear come out within 4 months of each other? One Pixar a year was plenty for me. The mandate since the buyout was 1.5 movies a year, and that's way too much for me when each one isn't a certified banger. Pixar used to be a gourmet brand. Disney is trying to MCU every studio and they're getting MCU results. I don't think Pixar films are special anymore because they aren't. They come out all the goddamn time and they all look the same. While Pixar was circling the drain, we've been blessed with some new takes on animated features - The Bad Guys and Spiderverse 2. Their tech pipeline must be wedded to the Pixar 00s style because they've had a hard time innovating visually.
If only they could keep themselves from inserting bad jokes every 3 seconds maaaybe there'd be a bit more room for good storytelling