It’s Too Soon to Call Elio Pixar’s Biggest Flop
Pixar’s animated outer-space adventure Elio follows an alien-abduction-obsessed orphan whose fondest wish comes true: After being picked up by warring extraterrestrials, he’s mistaken for Earth’s intergalactic ambassador and beamed across the universe. Over the weekend, however, Elio failed to launch at the box office, landing with a thud in 3,750 theaters as the lowest-grossing opening in the history of Disney’s blockbuster-minting computer-animated film division.
Projected to pull in as much as $30 million by prerelease “tracking” estimates, the sci-fi kids’ flick — which cost a reported $150 million to produce — grossed a paltry $21 million in North America. It ranks third among movies in wide release this past weekend, behind Universal’s live-action iteration of How to Train Your Dragon ($160.4 million in its second weekend) and the “totally nuts” Danny Boyle–directed zombie horror of 28 Years Later ($30 million domestically).
Hitting 2025’s halfway point, Disney leads all the other Hollywood studios with a combined $1.1 billion in North America box-office grosses, $371.7 million of that thanks to its non-cartoon redo of Lilo & Stitch. But the Elio underperformance underscores a significant and seemingly growing liability for Pixar. In the post-COVID era, the studio division responsible for so many of animation’s most indelible hits — Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and last year’s $1.69 billion-grossing Inside Out 2 among them — has faced one catastrophe after another with theatrical audiences for its non-sequel/non-IP titles.
To be sure, Elio faced no small number of production challenges. The original director, Adrian Molina (the writer and co-director of Pixar’s $814 million-grossing Día de Los Muertos odyssey, Coco), conceived of the movie as a passion project inspired by his own childhood experiences growing up on a military base. But after two years of development, he exited Elio to work on the comparatively higher-stakes Coco 2 and was replaced last year by Turning Red director Domee Shi and storyboard artist–Pixar veteran Madeline Sharafian. Over the course of that creative handover — as evidenced by the tonal shift between Elio’s existentially yearning 2023 teaser and jauntier 2025 trailer — the film evolved from what Molina had referred to as a “personal coming-of-age story about youthful alienation” to a more conventionally commercial galactic romp. Owing to what Disney described as Hollywood-strike-related delays, the movie was pushed from a scheduled March 2024 release to this summer.
One animation insider reached by Vulture feels the studio misread its intended audience by making Elio’s titular protagonist an 11-year-old; such a preteen character may connect with little kids but could curtail the film’s commerciality by limiting appeal to older adolescents. “The movie ‘looked’ young — too young for teens,” this person says. “All I can imagine is they drew the character too young. Should have been a lonely teen instead of a lonely preteen.”
But according to what has now become received wisdom among industry observers, the pandemic-era triple whammy of Pixar originals, Luca, Soul, and Turning Red, skipping theaters effectively rewired audience expectations. By sending all three straight to Disney+ — at a time when many theaters were closed by government mandate and the studio’s OTT platform was trying to impress Wall Street with growing subscriber numbers — Disney trained viewers to look for any Pixar movie without a number in its title on TV rather than at the Cineplex. (The so-called Pixar slump hit another low when the studio’s 2022 Toy Story spinoff, Lightyear, crashed and burned at the box office, losing the studio an estimated $106 million.)
Compounding those misfortunes, Elio emerged into the jet wash of How to Train Your Dragon, another family film and the fourth installment of a blockbuster franchise with more than two decades of audience goodwill that is certain to rank among the year’s most lucrative movies.
But at 84 percent “fresh” on the Tomatometer and with an A Cinemascore reflecting positive audience exit polling, Elio is widely expected to build upon its market share over the Fourth of July holiday-weekend corridor. And if the slow-burn journey of 2023’s Elemental has shown Hollywood anything, it may be too soon to label Elio a flop: Debuting to a spate of disastrous reviews at the Cannes Film Festival and similarly hitting wide release in the summertime, the fire-water rom-com fizzled over its opening weekend with a then-record-low-for-Pixar $29.6 million. But the $200 million underperformer managed to hang around in theaters and reverse course; it eventually grossed nearly half a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, became the most-watched title in Disney+ history, and won a Best Animated Feature Oscar while landing as 2023’s ninth-most-profitable film. “Elemental started very slow,” notes Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. “Everyone was like, ‘This movie’s a flop. Everyone hates it.’ Then it was in the top ten for box office that year. So everyone had that wrong.” His takeaway for original Pixar titles: “Never count them out early.”
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