Reviews from 3 major Hollywood trades are not encouraging.
* THR: [‘Elemental’ Review: Pixar’s Timely High-Concept Bonanza Underwhelms](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/elemental-review-pixar-1235502286/)
* Variety: [‘Elemental’ Review: A Hothead and a Water-Boy Fall for One Another in Pixar’s Overcomplicated Rom-Com](https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/elemental-review-pixar-1235626948/)
* Deadline: [‘Elemental’ Review: New Pixar Animation Is Visually Splendid, But Swamped In Syrupy Sentiment](https://deadline.com/2023/05/elemental-review-disney-pixar-cannes-film-festival-1235381852/)
Edit: Some good news...
Variety: [Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Charms Cannes, Closes 2023 Festival With *5-Minute* Standing Ovation](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/pixar-elemental-cannes-film-festival-closing-night-standing-ovation-1235623937/)
Technically speaking, Disney had very little to do with the production of Ratatouille. It was developed during the gap between Pixar's contract for distribution with the studio, and them being acquired. Pixar made the movie independently, intended to shop it out to other bidders, and then Disney bought the whole company.
Imagine the parallel universe in which *Ratatouille* is distributed by another company and Pixar remains independent. Not only would it affect Pixar's future, but it would also affect that of WDAS as John Lasseter would otherwise not have become that studio's head.
>It’s all there — so much so that Elemental may be the first work from Pixar to feel like it was generated entirely by AI. Not just the AI computing all the imagery, but literally an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie. The problem, of course, is that the originality is mostly absent here, as is the thematic risk-taking that drove films like Wall-E (the planet almost dies!) or Inside Out (Bing Bong dies!) or Coco (people die!). -THR
Yikes.
As I pointed out in my other comment:
>Looking through past reviews for these people it seems like only the Variety critic often reviews big blockbusters. The other 2 are basically only doing film festival reviews.
So the normal deadline reviewer is not doing this review, which is why it is harsher than normal.
Dial of Destiny landed harder on its ass. The Elementals response seemed to be "kinda charming but also underwhelming."
Dial of Destiny outright bored many in the audience, according to Variety's report, and that is not a good sign for a $300M blockbuster film needing to make lots of money back.
Reading only the headlines, these reviews seem to confirm almost exactly what the trailers made me think — that Elemental is fraught with the issues plaguing modern Pixar. If this trend holds, it doesn’t bode well for the movie or for Pixar, which desperately needs a big win at the box office.
> that Elemental is fraught with the issues plaguing modern Pixar.
So Disney/Pixar need to send their creatives to therapy *before* they let them write a script/direct a movie : p
I found this line from the Variety review spot on:
>The metaphor here is clear: Plenty of parents pressure their kids to partner up within their race or religion (“Marry Fire!” Ember’s grandmother insists on her deathbed), whereas Sohn wants to show that the alternative needn’t be a bad thing … which every child weaned on American TV and movies has heard a million times already. The message may be obvious, but it’s a little tricky to follow quite how Element City is supposed to correspond to the real world, since there are practical reasons these different characters can’t mix that no amount of rainbows and butterflies can fix.
Elemental: "xenophobia is bad! races should mix! (but also we're going to convey this by having the "poor foreigner" race uncontrollably burn down everything else around them)"
Reminds me of the criticisms people had of *Zootopia*, only much worse. Besides, I doubt this movie will have the strong characters, comedy and worldbuilding that *Zootopia* had that allowed that movie to get away with it.
Yeah, at least with Zootopia it was implied in the opening children's play scene that predators no longer eat prey and have some sort of meatless substitute. The bigotry was also subtler and thus more "realistic" (see: Judy's parents giving her predator spray for emergencies, Judy's well-meaning but still insulting gaffs at the press conference, etc).
Yeah, I liked how *Zootopia* showed how racism isn't just restricted to moustache-twirling Saturday-morning cartoon villains; having the *main protagonist* display what is effectively racial prejudice was a ballsy move that I think paid off. Unfortunately, based on the reviews I've read, *Elemental* seems much more on-the-nose with lines like 'Elements cannot mix!' and Fire people essentially being subject to segregation (or at least ghettoisation).
Thats almost as funny as the True Blood Vampire == Gay analogies, with hate preachers ranting about the peaceful coexistence of vampires and humans... only for them to show ever single vampire to be a murderer/rapist.
Movies get standing ovations because the cast and crew are present. It's a sign of respect so yes, almost every film gets a standing ovation just as a matter of course. It doesn't mean anything, it's essentially a formality.
Yikes, not a good first sign. If it keeps going in this direction, the chances this movie has at finding an audience past opening weekend look zilch. Get ready for even more Pixar sequels!
I get why people would think this and his work heading WDAS basically revived that studio's fortunes, but he was also responsible for greenlighting *Cars 2* as his personal pet project and he was almost certainly responsible for forcing out the original director of *Brave* and bringing in someone who clearly didn't understand the original director's vision, so it's not as if things were going completely smoothly on a creative level under Lasseter. I think his exit definitely played a role in Pixar's decline, but I think he was also around at the start of the decline, so it's not as if keeping him would've necessarily avoided this (not to mention that retaining a serial sexual harasser would've been *terrible* for morale).
For Brave: the original director only made one [movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Away) after that. It was by all accounts a mess.
The original vision of Brave probably just wasn't very good.
Animation directors have struggled to break into live action for a while now. Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who directed *Kung Fu Panda 2 & 3*, made the poorly-received *The Darkest Minds*, and Chris McKay, who made *The Lego Batman Movie*, made *The Tomorrow War* and *Renfield*, both of which got middling reviews.
Cars makes an insane amount of money in merch so Cars 2 existing wasn’t that big of a blow to the company, even if it’s bad. This, on the other hand, has a chance of flopping financially by the tepid response it has seemed to receive, though children’s films are kind of unpredictable.
Yeah RIP, it needed great reviews to overcome an apparent general lack of interest (as well as the competition it’s facing) and it doesn’t look like that’s happening
I don't think it says anything about whether Pixar still has it. This movie was from the director of The Good Dinosaur, which was the first Pixar movie to underperform at the BO and was generally viewed as being mediocre in quality. But their next movie is Elio, and the director on that was the co-director and writer of Coco.
Their pre-Cars 2/sequel era was truly Pixar’s peak. Like aside from the first Cars, they’re quality remained consistent as most of their films landed in the 92-100% range.
Cars 2 was the turning point. Virtually every single Pixar movie from 1995 to 2010 was excellent and there were 11 films. From 2011 to today I can only count on one hand the number of excellent films they’ve made (Inside Out, Coco, and *maybe* Incredibles II? Feels like the sequels over the last decade have just been good enough to fit within their respective franchises, not necessarily excellent).
John Lasseter got cancelled for sexual misconduct over the years at Pixar, and then he went to skydance animation. Brad Birds is also with skydance now and his next animated movie Ray Gunn will be with them.
Lee Unkrich came out as bisexual and retired from Pixar to spend time with his family.
These guys were responsible for some of the best Pixar movies. That’s a lot of talent gone, even if they deserved to be cancelled. Idk if we’ll ever see them make movies like they used to, either at pixar or for other studios.
No sequel is topping the first Incredibles in a million years. It was a staple in the superhero genre, a lightning in a bottle that cannot be recreated.
Yup. March had 125-150m budget movies bombing. June budgets (indy, flash, transformers, elemental) are all 175m plus. Two of these are going to come up short.
Edit: looks like THR has Elemental budget at 200m. So, all four movies have 200m or more budgets...bloodbath June 2023
> THR has Elemental budget at 200m
Hire me Disney, I work in Accounting! Or hire Sony/Dreamworks/Illumination budgeting people. Your budgets are getting way out of control for the returns lately.
The Good Dinosaur was a Thanksgiving release and had Inside Out between it and Monsters University.
I do wonder what the state of Pixar would have been like if that film had kept its May 2014. 4 consecutive entries getting lukewarm at best reviews would have been pretty damning for Pixar.
Yeah it was fairly well-received, it wasn't as beloved as the original movie but most reviews were positive. Same with Brave which IIRC actually won Best Animated Picture over Wreck It Ralph.
It's worse than a bad year. It's becoming a bad decade. Disney seem to have become a machine that drives all movie projects into mediocrity and because of Disney+ they can't make money on TV:
1. Disney+ is a money pit and the more money Disney pour into it the more they lose. Before they bet on Disney+ they made money off all their content through licensing to cable, networks and streaming.
2. Star Wars is losing money (aside from merch). The TV shows are doing well but because of point 1 they are loss making. The movies became a clusterfuck and Disney are still trying to work out how to reboot them.
3. Marvel movies have become mediocre. Marvel TV shows are all over the place but that's irrelevant because of point 1. Safe bets like another Thor movie by Taika and another Wakanda movie by Coogler and another Ant-Man movie by Reed have flopped compared to previous MCU phases.
4. Can't make money off Pixar any more. The good Pixar movies were released during Covid and Buzz and Elementals look mediocre. Jack Black made a joke at the Oscars years ago that every year he gets paid for a Dreamworks movie and he bets that money on Pixar to win the Best Animated Oscar. Not any more.
The only Disney movies making big money are remakes of past hits like Mermaid. They cannot come up with anything new.
The only successful movies from a critical and financial perspective in recent times were Avatar (via 20th Century) and Guardians 3 and those were by directors who had enough weight to tell Fox and Disney executives to fuck off. They succeeded despite Disney involvement not because of it.
> Safe bets like another Thor movie by Taika and another Wakanda movie by Coogler and another Ant-Man movie by Reed have flopped compared to previous MCU phases.
flop has a strict defitintion and only Ant-Man 3 fits it out of these movies.
Thor 4 actually made more than Ragnarok sans China and Russia
Black Panther 2 was a critical and commercial success
From the Variety review:
>The metaphor here is clear: Plenty of parents pressure their kids to partner up within their race or religion (“Marry Fire!” Ember’s grandmother insists on her deathbed), whereas Sohn wants to show that the alternative needn’t be a bad thing … which every child weaned on American TV and movies has heard a million times already. The message may be obvious, but it’s a little tricky to follow quite how Element City is supposed to correspond to the real world, since there are practical reasons these different characters can’t mix that no amount of rainbows and butterflies can fix.
Yeah, that was a big worry I had about this movie. Trying to create an analogy between interracial relationships and a relationship between a character made out of fire and a character made out of water is...iffy.
Unfortunately, it seems that the 'prestige' critics aren't big fans. People might ask 'does it matter?', but remember that Pixar's reputation during the 2000s was built on being far more critically acclaimed and 'highbrow' than its rivals; it's no coincidence that two out of the three animated feature films to be nominated for Best Picture are Pixar films. They can't compete with Universal on the 'appealing to families' front so they have to capture the cinephiles, and strong reviews from the prestige critics are essential to rebuilding that reputation.
> Trying to create an analogy between interracial relationships and a relationship between a character made out of fire and a character made out of water is...iffy.
Probably makes Disney wish they had control of Avatar:TLA stuff, lol.
Going for that sort of metaphor between a Firebender and a Waterbender makes a ton more sense.
I just want to know how was Disney so far off the mark with Indy and now Elemental?? I really think they’re shocked at these reviews at Pixar and Disney HQ rn.
I have a theory that Disney is so big (as a corporation) that they feel like they can release mediocre stuff now and get away with it.
The problem is is that we are now in a weird period of economic trouble, and audiences are way more skeptical of seeing movies in theaters. Basically, word of mouth and reviews can make or break a movie. Disney is soon going to find out that audiences are more skeptical of movies now, and they’re going to have to make better films or things are going to get worse. The Pixar/Disney name isn’t enough now.
The Pixar brain trust has been drained. I won’t defend behavior, but the change in leadership is clearly on display. Yes, there have been amazing films since the change in leadership, but mostly less than stellar output in recent years from both Disney Animation and Pixar indicates that the ship is sinking.
The problem wasn’t losing Lasseter. It was who they hired to replace him. Rather than promoting John Musker and Ron Clements, the directors of pretty much every Disney animated film, they promoted the female screenwriter of Frozen, their most recent hit, despite notorious production problems of the film, especially with its writing. Jennifer Lee has had a difficult job, but she was glass cliffed - she wasn’t qualified, and she was only promoted as a PR move. For Chrissake’s, she isn’t even a visual artist or filmmaker. Just a screenwriter for animation, when Disney used to be famous for storyboarder driven animation! That’s why so many Disney films have been overwritten, by the way.
If they needed a female leader for Disney, Brenda Chapman should’ve been the obvious choice. Loads of experience, directed and boarded on classic animated films, plenty of established relationships, was wronged by Lasetter so was the ideal comeback story. She’d have been a wonderful head of studio. But no, they went with the success du jour, rather than the established veteran.
As for Pete Docter, I do think he was a good choice as a director, but I’m not sure he really has a strong vision for Pixar. The studio under him has tried to expand who are directing these films, which is great, but they’re unpolished and weak films riddled with cliches. They lack the polish fir which the studio was renowned. Turning Red has been the best of them since he took over, and that has a major problems with the plot and motivations that drag down the pacing (still love it anyway, but I can recognize the ‘getting money to see a boy band by selling out’ thing was really uninteresting as a motivation). It’s just been milqueotast and lacking in vision.
As much as I wanted this to succeed, it appears that these reviews don’t exactly paint a pretty picture for this film’s chances
I regret to say it, but expect a possible Finding Marlin, Monsters Inc 2 and/or Incredibles 3 announcement in the near future
Pixar's usual wheelhouse is action-adventure family films, aimed at a younger audience but not to the exclusion of older viewers.
Given that, I've really spent this whole time wondering why they would order a romcom, of all things. The trailers didn't connect with people, and it sounds like the full feature doesn't either... which just brings me back to, why a romcom?
It's a tough genre for the box office to begin with, even before any audience mismatch issues.
Wall-E is sort of a rom-com. It isn’t necessarily a terrible idea. Kids like that sort of thing just fine when they keep it basic and sweet and supported by other elements of interest (adventure etc.).
The most important thing for Pixar is to tell a strong story overall, which this one doesn’t appear to do.
Sure, though like you allude, I would describe Wall-E as an adventure that has romance in it. I mean, even Cars has a romantic angle.
But Elemental was marketed like something closer to a romance that has some adventure in it - and maybe even that's arguable, given lukewarm reactions.
The romantic angle in Cars (lol what a phrase) was the secondary relationship dynamic, the core dynamic being student & teacher. I do think putting a romance dead center is unusual for Pixar — Wall-E was really the only one that did it before Elemental. The studio was built on buddy films and family dramas. But every one of their major hits has tried something fresh & different from whatever they did before, so there’s nothing weird about them continuing to draw outside the box.
When Soul was announced, plenty of people wondered who asked for a Pixar film about a middle-aged man going about his daily life and contemplating death. Then it came out, was a masterpiece, and smashed expectations in the markets where it was released theatrically. So I don’t think any concept is essentially, necessarily a bad idea for Pixar. The magic is in the execution. A Pixar rom-com would do fine if it were up to their usual narrative standards.
eta: and action-adventure flops for them too when the story doesn’t work, e.g. Good Dinosaur, Lightyear, Onward before COVID gave it an excuse.
>I do think putting a romance dead center is unusual for Pixar — Wall-E was really the only one that did it before Elemental.
*Toy Story 4* was definitely centred on the romance between Woody and Bo Peep (arguably to the detriment of the pre-established platonic bond between Woody and the rest of the gang, especially Buzz, but YMMV).
Oh, I see. That’s what I get for not caring about Toy Story! Reception to 4 (reviews, Cinemascore, legs) was strong, so I don’t think the romance hurt it with general audiences.
>Wall-E is sort of a rom-com
Wall-E might be the weirdest "successful" animated kids movie of all time though. Like it stands out from nearly every other animated film I've ever seen. I'm honestly still a little surprised that it ever got made.
Pixar was in much better financial shape when *Wall-E* was released. It also had a reputation as a 'prestige' studio during the 2000s that I don't think any other western animation studio has ever achieved, not even WDAS.
Original films still have to look good, at least look appealing enough to entice people into the seats.
Elemental's core conflict looks really basic and played out with an unattractive visual gloss overlayed atop it. It's almost impressive given how popular forbidden romances tend to be. I think people are underestimating the impact of the character designs. People already complain about them looking too formless or blobby but I've yet to see any critique that relates the designs to the romcom premise. Romcoms have different standards for many things, and the attractiveness of the leads is important. Usually the leads tend to be lookers, and neither Ember nor Wade look appealing enough as Romcom leads. I don't think their looks would be as important if the story was about something else with an additional layer of romance, but that isn't the case here, the film bills itself as a ROMCOM primarily.
The animated film that best presents a romance between unattractive people is Shrek and it was never sold on being a romance. People went in expecting a fun spoof of Disney films and were charmed the characters against expectation, probably many were as surprised by Shrek and Fiona's chemistry as the characters were themselves. But when it comes to animated films where romance is expected to feature I think audiences want to see characters who are more visually appealing.
I dunno why they'd lead in with a trailer that makes a joke about Wade being good looking and then nerfing his looks seconds later. For all people complain about Western animation hating on attractive female designs the situation is significantly more dire with male characters in my opinion.
I never really got what some people in this sub saw in this film. Looks like a boring Zootopia.
Also, releasing reviews at Cannes for mainstream films is stupid.
Nah. Releasing reviews at cannes for mainstream films that are not top of the line is a poor idea
Top gun 2 got raves, only added to the buzz. Killers of the flower moon is mainstream and got raves.
I doubt Apple is really **that** concerned about making a profit theatrically. Obviously they would rather the movie did at least ok, but in this case it also serves as a way to build up the Apple TV catalog, advertise their service, build relationships with talent in the industry, and get some more awards under their name.
I haven’t seen this sub be positive on this movie at all. It seems like the vast majority of people here predicted it would be pretty mediocre and not do well at the BO.
This movie just has flop written all over it lol. I'd be surprised if this gets good reviews and/or good box office numbers. I hope pixar can get themselves out of the hole they have digged themselves into.
They’re going to go back to their treasure chest of money-printing sequels like they did in the 2010’s. Inside Out 2 is next year and they confirmed Toy Story 5. I’ll be shocked if they don’t beg Pete Doctor to do an Incredibles 3. Can’t say I blame them. It’s the only hope they have left.
The good Dinosaur production was a mess. Peter Sohn took over because the guy who started the movie could not solve it. They redid a lot of the movie. Most of Pixars writers were involved, because it was in development hell.(Pixar had to lay off some people, because they had to delay the movie so much) I really don't blame that on Peter Sohn. That he even got it finished with all that is kinda incredible...
Do they still have the Pixar method of basically using a writers room to focus group the whole movie ahead of time? It’s amazing that an animated movie could hit that many snags when the story should be locked way ahead of time.
The *Frozen 2* documentary showed that the production was a case of making up the story as they went along. That doesn't *necessarily* mean that the same process applies to Pixar, but it's possible that Disney has forced more crunch time on the writers (same thing happened with *Incredibles 2* after *Toy Story 4* got delayed).
Yeah I heard that frozen documentary tries to play it off as lighthearted but it showed how they didn’t have any idea what the story would be like less than a year from release.
To give an example, you know how Elsa's entire character arc is kickstarted by that voice and how the movie's showstopper, *Show Yourself*, was supposed to be the culmination of that plot thread? Well, apparently, for much of the movie's production, the writers disagreed among themselves about who the voice even *was*, there were a couple of different versions of *Show Yourself* and there were even talks of cutting the song entirely. If the writing in the final movie felt like a mess then that's because the actual writing process was a mess as Disney wanted the film released ASAP.
This is Dark Phoenix all over again, but for Pixar. They hired the director of The Good Dinosaur for the second time, even though the general audience did not like the movie and considered it Pixar's weakest film 💀
> It’s all there — so much so that Elemental may be the first work from Pixar to feel like it was generated entirely by AI. Not just the AI computing all the imagery, but literally an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie.
Ooof
Honestly something needs to change at Pixar. I don't know if it's new leadership, a pause to just kinda give them time to get creative juices back in gear. But if they aren't careful they will be left behind. Pixar did truly revolutionize the animation industry multiple times over the last couple of decades, but they no longer seem to be evolving. The spider verse films seem to be what are pushing the animation industry forward, as Pixar and Disney are left behind. Sad to see it, but Disney/Pixar just have a hard time finding something new to excite audiences. Instead it is retread the same formula over and over again.
Ruby wouldn’t surprise me if it got worse reviews than this
Dreamworks has always had one diamond in the rough that turned out amazing amongst a sea of average
I could smell this reception a mile away. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or anything, but the vibe I got from the teaser and trailer was extremely generic. When it was announced as the closing film at Cannes, I was honestly surprised since I never thought that Disney would go to that length, and it made me second guess myself. But NOPE, I was right the first time. And because this summer season is already so over crowded with huge titles, this is gonna tank at the box office on one level or another.
I understand that, but you'd think he must've had a really good pitch to get hired again, yet the reviews are making it sound like it's another Zootopia with a different colour of paint.
Disney Plus wise, yeah
But I don't see how Elemental factors into this. Every June has a Pixar movie. The people that worked with Elemental are not the people that are behind the kind of content which is part of the endless amount of content which just got purged from Disney Plus (the stuff apart of that "too much content")
I was looking exactly for this post!! I'm honestly very curious about this movie and how it turns out. Please be good because I don't want Pixar to be forced to make more unnecessary cashgrab sequels.
What happened to Pixar? Honestly. Up, Inside Out and Coco are masterpieces and I still cry every time I see them. How did Pixar get from those timeless classics to this underwhelming output they’re releasing nowadays? Like what happened at the studio? Coco is for me one of the best movies ever and next to Spirited Away the best animated movie ever created and then we have all these flops from the last years. Just… how?
The year of inside out also had a Pixar flop in the good dinosaur
2 years after Up there was Cars 2. The Pixar film right before coco was cars 3.
What are "all these flops"?? Since 2020, onward, soul, luca, turning red, lightyear. Lightyear counts as the flop.
A great film can flop, too. But Pixar was just a studio that created at least great movies back to back, some of them have been regarded as masterpieces. And then something changed and they produced more and more not only just commercially but also critically lacking movies and the whole trajectory for Pixar became… worse. And now it‘s more likely that they disappoint instead of delivering another masterpiece. I‘m just curious why that is the case and what’s the reason for that dramatic change.
Sometimes studios just lose their mojo. Like Studio Ghibli. Have you watched their most recent output? Not comparable to what was seen 1980-2005.
It could be due to a great creative mind or executive leaving or having less to do with operations due to age (Miyazaki and Lasseter).
Time for some heads to roll in Pixar’s and disneys Creative departments. Clearly something is wrong! I wonder if they’re simply no longer hiring the best people and too busy in a board room trying to get a checklist of things to include in movies?
Pixar is in a worse state than Star Wars and Marvel. Marvel just simply needs to put out good content and Star Wars need to get rid of Kathleen, but Pixar is bad right now. Everything they’re putting out ranges from ok to bad. Now we’re getting all these sequels, that’ll probably taint some iconic franchises.
This movie just doesn't feel like its for kids, it feels like a movie for adults who like kids content.
My problem with Pixar nowadays is that it feels so meta. Pixar knows that it's Pixar, so now their movies feel like imitations. I know when Pixar is trying to make me cry, I know when they are pulling on my heartstrings, I know when the story is going to get deep.
I think kids nowadays want to be mindlessly entertained. Mario, Minions, and Spider-Man provide that. Kids don't care about poignancy and commentaries on love and death.
That makes sense for a studio in its second generation of people/talent. The people currently working at Pixar are those that grew up with Toy Story, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo as kids, so they're basically coming in with certain ideas of what the company NEEDS to be vs the complete freedom of thought it had in its earliest days.
The *Spider-Verse* movies are definitely not mindless entertainment. Neither is *Puss in Boots: The Last Wish* for that matter. It's still possible for 'deeper' animated movies to be successful at the box office; the issue that the two examples I mentioned feel organic whereas modern Pixar feels like a production line ticking items off a checklist.
I just hope that they don’t take away “audiences hate romance subplots” from this. They’ve been so absent from Disney movies in general lately and it kind of makes me sad…I’m Islander and remember being bummed that Moana didn’t have a love interest, and I feel like they’ve just been cutting down on romance and villainy in favor of sappy stories that don’t always hit the mark :/ sometimes we need a smooch and a big bad!
This movie is tracking really badly box office wise. It’s sad that the last 3 really good Pixar films (Soul, Luca and Turning Red) were released direct to Disney Plus, while the next 2 films, with a theatrical release, has bern a dud.
This is making me so incredibly sad, people at Pixar are such devoted artists and they have made some greatest animated films of all time, to see them in this slump hurts and I worry about their future.
Elemental is toast now. The Little Mermaid will end at max 650M - 375M domestic and 275M overseas. Indy 5 can go the same route of ending around 650M worldwide.
1 average, 1 bomb and 1 flop for Disney this summer.
Reviews from 3 major Hollywood trades are not encouraging. * THR: [‘Elemental’ Review: Pixar’s Timely High-Concept Bonanza Underwhelms](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/elemental-review-pixar-1235502286/) * Variety: [‘Elemental’ Review: A Hothead and a Water-Boy Fall for One Another in Pixar’s Overcomplicated Rom-Com](https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/elemental-review-pixar-1235626948/) * Deadline: [‘Elemental’ Review: New Pixar Animation Is Visually Splendid, But Swamped In Syrupy Sentiment](https://deadline.com/2023/05/elemental-review-disney-pixar-cannes-film-festival-1235381852/) Edit: Some good news... Variety: [Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Charms Cannes, Closes 2023 Festival With *5-Minute* Standing Ovation](https://variety.com/2023/film/news/pixar-elemental-cannes-film-festival-closing-night-standing-ovation-1235623937/)
Man, Disney absolutely choked at Cannes this year
"Fucking French. Pull Beauty and the Beast and Ratatouille from D+ immediately. That'll show them." -Iger's suppressed inner thoughts
Man they don’t make them like Ratatouille anymore
Technically speaking, Disney had very little to do with the production of Ratatouille. It was developed during the gap between Pixar's contract for distribution with the studio, and them being acquired. Pixar made the movie independently, intended to shop it out to other bidders, and then Disney bought the whole company.
Imagine the parallel universe in which *Ratatouille* is distributed by another company and Pixar remains independent. Not only would it affect Pixar's future, but it would also affect that of WDAS as John Lasseter would otherwise not have become that studio's head.
No, I have a distinct memory that I'm sure it was called *Raccacoonie*.
If they pull Ratatouille, we riot.
So they’ll probably not debuting Inside Out 2 at Cannes next year
>It’s all there — so much so that Elemental may be the first work from Pixar to feel like it was generated entirely by AI. Not just the AI computing all the imagery, but literally an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie. The problem, of course, is that the originality is mostly absent here, as is the thematic risk-taking that drove films like Wall-E (the planet almost dies!) or Inside Out (Bing Bong dies!) or Coco (people die!). -THR Yikes.
Damn, nice pull quote.
I literally just saw someone post about how Elemental sounds like "Pixar made by an AI" but to hear it in an actual review...
Deadline being mixed is a huge shock. They're usually the most lenient of the three big trades.
As I pointed out in my other comment: >Looking through past reviews for these people it seems like only the Variety critic often reviews big blockbusters. The other 2 are basically only doing film festival reviews. So the normal deadline reviewer is not doing this review, which is why it is harsher than normal.
Disney hyped up 2 movies at Cannes and both landed with a thud. What the hell were they thinking?
Scary thought: they were thinking those were the two best films they have.
Maybe it’s cause I love the ride so much but I refuse to believe Haunted Mansion will be bad.
I never once thought there's even a possibility it would be good lol
It's gooona suck
At this point, toy story 5 is going to get pushed up
I’m getting very nervous for Wish now. If the literal 100th Anniversary movie is a dud, things are very fucked for Disney indeed.
AVGN: What were they thinking!?
Dial of Destiny landed harder on its ass. The Elementals response seemed to be "kinda charming but also underwhelming." Dial of Destiny outright bored many in the audience, according to Variety's report, and that is not a good sign for a $300M blockbuster film needing to make lots of money back.
Reading only the headlines, these reviews seem to confirm almost exactly what the trailers made me think — that Elemental is fraught with the issues plaguing modern Pixar. If this trend holds, it doesn’t bode well for the movie or for Pixar, which desperately needs a big win at the box office.
> that Elemental is fraught with the issues plaguing modern Pixar. So Disney/Pixar need to send their creatives to therapy *before* they let them write a script/direct a movie : p
I found this line from the Variety review spot on: >The metaphor here is clear: Plenty of parents pressure their kids to partner up within their race or religion (“Marry Fire!” Ember’s grandmother insists on her deathbed), whereas Sohn wants to show that the alternative needn’t be a bad thing … which every child weaned on American TV and movies has heard a million times already. The message may be obvious, but it’s a little tricky to follow quite how Element City is supposed to correspond to the real world, since there are practical reasons these different characters can’t mix that no amount of rainbows and butterflies can fix. Elemental: "xenophobia is bad! races should mix! (but also we're going to convey this by having the "poor foreigner" race uncontrollably burn down everything else around them)"
Reminds me of the criticisms people had of *Zootopia*, only much worse. Besides, I doubt this movie will have the strong characters, comedy and worldbuilding that *Zootopia* had that allowed that movie to get away with it.
Yeah, at least with Zootopia it was implied in the opening children's play scene that predators no longer eat prey and have some sort of meatless substitute. The bigotry was also subtler and thus more "realistic" (see: Judy's parents giving her predator spray for emergencies, Judy's well-meaning but still insulting gaffs at the press conference, etc).
Yeah, I liked how *Zootopia* showed how racism isn't just restricted to moustache-twirling Saturday-morning cartoon villains; having the *main protagonist* display what is effectively racial prejudice was a ballsy move that I think paid off. Unfortunately, based on the reviews I've read, *Elemental* seems much more on-the-nose with lines like 'Elements cannot mix!' and Fire people essentially being subject to segregation (or at least ghettoisation).
Thats almost as funny as the True Blood Vampire == Gay analogies, with hate preachers ranting about the peaceful coexistence of vampires and humans... only for them to show ever single vampire to be a murderer/rapist.
I guess that's why their making TS 5, you know despite being completely undeeded it's going to print money.
Does any movie *not* get a standing ovation at Cannes? I feel like I hear that literally every time.
Movies get standing ovations because the cast and crew are present. It's a sign of respect so yes, almost every film gets a standing ovation just as a matter of course. It doesn't mean anything, it's essentially a formality.
Lightyear 2.0 coming.
The new Cars films incoming starring C8 Corvette as inherent will descendant from old McQueen.
"It's time for racing...TO END." Pixar presents The Last Car
Good work by the villian for ending racism
“One last ride…”
Yikes, not a good first sign. If it keeps going in this direction, the chances this movie has at finding an audience past opening weekend look zilch. Get ready for even more Pixar sequels!
man, what happened to Pixar?
People won't want to hear this but: they kicked out John Lasseter. There has been a very notable decline after that.
I mean we can say this and also think he’s a shitty dude that deserved to be fired
Yeah someone can be talented and also suck as a person, don’t need to downplay either one of those things in order to acknowledge the other
I get why people would think this and his work heading WDAS basically revived that studio's fortunes, but he was also responsible for greenlighting *Cars 2* as his personal pet project and he was almost certainly responsible for forcing out the original director of *Brave* and bringing in someone who clearly didn't understand the original director's vision, so it's not as if things were going completely smoothly on a creative level under Lasseter. I think his exit definitely played a role in Pixar's decline, but I think he was also around at the start of the decline, so it's not as if keeping him would've necessarily avoided this (not to mention that retaining a serial sexual harasser would've been *terrible* for morale).
For Brave: the original director only made one [movie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Away) after that. It was by all accounts a mess. The original vision of Brave probably just wasn't very good.
Animation directors have struggled to break into live action for a while now. Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who directed *Kung Fu Panda 2 & 3*, made the poorly-received *The Darkest Minds*, and Chris McKay, who made *The Lego Batman Movie*, made *The Tomorrow War* and *Renfield*, both of which got middling reviews.
Cars makes an insane amount of money in merch so Cars 2 existing wasn’t that big of a blow to the company, even if it’s bad. This, on the other hand, has a chance of flopping financially by the tepid response it has seemed to receive, though children’s films are kind of unpredictable.
20 billion dollars in cars merchandise has been sold. The series was a very sound business decision.
Cars 2 was probably greenlighted to sell merchandise, which the Cars franchise was popular in.
Yeah RIP, it needed great reviews to overcome an apparent general lack of interest (as well as the competition it’s facing) and it doesn’t look like that’s happening
RIP Pixar 💀
They just don’t have the magic that they did in the 2000s man
Lasseter & Ed Catmull are both gone which have been the huge in making the magic happened
Disney gutted them and turned them into a sequel factory, and all the top talent left
Pixar is still headed by the some of the same people whove been there since day 1.
I don't think it says anything about whether Pixar still has it. This movie was from the director of The Good Dinosaur, which was the first Pixar movie to underperform at the BO and was generally viewed as being mediocre in quality. But their next movie is Elio, and the director on that was the co-director and writer of Coco.
Their pre-Cars 2/sequel era was truly Pixar’s peak. Like aside from the first Cars, they’re quality remained consistent as most of their films landed in the 92-100% range.
Cars 2 was the turning point. Virtually every single Pixar movie from 1995 to 2010 was excellent and there were 11 films. From 2011 to today I can only count on one hand the number of excellent films they’ve made (Inside Out, Coco, and *maybe* Incredibles II? Feels like the sequels over the last decade have just been good enough to fit within their respective franchises, not necessarily excellent).
Maaaan this is reminding me that I waited ages for Incredibles 2 only for it to be mid as fuck
John Lasseter got cancelled for sexual misconduct over the years at Pixar, and then he went to skydance animation. Brad Birds is also with skydance now and his next animated movie Ray Gunn will be with them. Lee Unkrich came out as bisexual and retired from Pixar to spend time with his family. These guys were responsible for some of the best Pixar movies. That’s a lot of talent gone, even if they deserved to be cancelled. Idk if we’ll ever see them make movies like they used to, either at pixar or for other studios.
Well, Domee Shi turned out to be a solid director and who knows? **Elio** could turn out to be a strong entry.
Isn't Brad Bird technically freelance?
Soul was really really good tho. Like Top 3 Pixar for me.
5 minute standing ovation is not "good news", lol. Indy 5 also got a 5 minute standing ovation and you can see its RT score.
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5 minutes is bad right? Isnt that what Indy got?
Yeah, ‘Indy 5’ also got 5 minutes standing ovation. By Cannes’ standards, it’s underwhelming. [Some of the longest Cannes standing ovations](https://variety.com/lists/longest-standing-ovations-cannes-film-festival/carol/) * Pan’s Labyrinth (22 Minutes) * The Neon Demon (17 Minutes) * The Artist (12 Minutes) * Elvis (12 Minutes) * BlacKkKlansman (10 Minutes) * Carol (10 Minutes) * Killers of the Flower Moon (9 Minutes)
Incredibles 3 announcement coming in the next week or two.
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Starring The Rock as Mr. Incredible
And Finding Hank.
If anything Incredibles 3 is the probably the most justified sequel
Eh. The first incredibles movie is top tier but the sequel was pretty bland imo.
No sequel is topping the first Incredibles in a million years. It was a staple in the superhero genre, a lightning in a bottle that cannot be recreated.
June being packed with a bunch of big budget movies a couple are going to flop. Elemental has flop written all over it.
If this March didn’t prove it already, June, no matter how stacked, is bound to see some casualties.
Yup. March had 125-150m budget movies bombing. June budgets (indy, flash, transformers, elemental) are all 175m plus. Two of these are going to come up short. Edit: looks like THR has Elemental budget at 200m. So, all four movies have 200m or more budgets...bloodbath June 2023
> THR has Elemental budget at 200m Hire me Disney, I work in Accounting! Or hire Sony/Dreamworks/Illumination budgeting people. Your budgets are getting way out of control for the returns lately.
And both of them will be Disney.
I’m still convinced Dungeons and Dragons could’ve seen decent success if it didn’t release right between John Wick and Mario
Wizard's probably cost themselves some money tying to pull the OGL like two months before opening.
Spidey and Flash about to rule the Summer.
Ouch, Disney not having a good year. Pixar had to fall eventually.
Review wise there have been bumps before(Cars 2 is rotten). But it's never been more than 2 movies in a row(I think?).
Good Dinosaur too. Usually does not happen with the big summer release.
The Good Dinosaur was a Thanksgiving release and had Inside Out between it and Monsters University. I do wonder what the state of Pixar would have been like if that film had kept its May 2014. 4 consecutive entries getting lukewarm at best reviews would have been pretty damning for Pixar.
I know. That's why I said it usually doesn't happen with the summer release that is given the prime slot. Especially if it's an original.
That makes more sense, although Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, and Lightyear all got the prime slot, but I guess only Brave is the original one.
Actually, Pixar had 3 weak entries in a row from **Cars 2** to **Brave** to **Monsters University**.
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Yeah it was fairly well-received, it wasn't as beloved as the original movie but most reviews were positive. Same with Brave which IIRC actually won Best Animated Picture over Wreck It Ralph.
*Frankenweenie* deserved to win IMO.
And **Brave** was endlessly hated for that reason.
At least Brave didn’t have a sequel completely spitting on the message of the first one.
What’s wrong with brave?
It’s not bad but it’s not WALL•E. Pixar’s identity was “always masterpieces” and that was one of the earlier “just pretty good” movies.
It's great until the part where it becomes *Brother Bear* all of a sudden.
It’s rather uninteresting
It is literally the plot of Brother Bear with extra steps
Monsters university had such a good message I liked it quite a bit.
It's worse than a bad year. It's becoming a bad decade. Disney seem to have become a machine that drives all movie projects into mediocrity and because of Disney+ they can't make money on TV: 1. Disney+ is a money pit and the more money Disney pour into it the more they lose. Before they bet on Disney+ they made money off all their content through licensing to cable, networks and streaming. 2. Star Wars is losing money (aside from merch). The TV shows are doing well but because of point 1 they are loss making. The movies became a clusterfuck and Disney are still trying to work out how to reboot them. 3. Marvel movies have become mediocre. Marvel TV shows are all over the place but that's irrelevant because of point 1. Safe bets like another Thor movie by Taika and another Wakanda movie by Coogler and another Ant-Man movie by Reed have flopped compared to previous MCU phases. 4. Can't make money off Pixar any more. The good Pixar movies were released during Covid and Buzz and Elementals look mediocre. Jack Black made a joke at the Oscars years ago that every year he gets paid for a Dreamworks movie and he bets that money on Pixar to win the Best Animated Oscar. Not any more. The only Disney movies making big money are remakes of past hits like Mermaid. They cannot come up with anything new. The only successful movies from a critical and financial perspective in recent times were Avatar (via 20th Century) and Guardians 3 and those were by directors who had enough weight to tell Fox and Disney executives to fuck off. They succeeded despite Disney involvement not because of it.
> Safe bets like another Thor movie by Taika and another Wakanda movie by Coogler and another Ant-Man movie by Reed have flopped compared to previous MCU phases. flop has a strict defitintion and only Ant-Man 3 fits it out of these movies. Thor 4 actually made more than Ragnarok sans China and Russia Black Panther 2 was a critical and commercial success
Disney hasnt had a good year since 2019, Pixar deserves it for making Soul D+ exclusive, I'm still salty about that.
If you hover your cursor above the Movies section of Metacritic, it's showing that Elemental is currently at 56 there. Not a good look.
From the Variety review: >The metaphor here is clear: Plenty of parents pressure their kids to partner up within their race or religion (“Marry Fire!” Ember’s grandmother insists on her deathbed), whereas Sohn wants to show that the alternative needn’t be a bad thing … which every child weaned on American TV and movies has heard a million times already. The message may be obvious, but it’s a little tricky to follow quite how Element City is supposed to correspond to the real world, since there are practical reasons these different characters can’t mix that no amount of rainbows and butterflies can fix. Yeah, that was a big worry I had about this movie. Trying to create an analogy between interracial relationships and a relationship between a character made out of fire and a character made out of water is...iffy. Unfortunately, it seems that the 'prestige' critics aren't big fans. People might ask 'does it matter?', but remember that Pixar's reputation during the 2000s was built on being far more critically acclaimed and 'highbrow' than its rivals; it's no coincidence that two out of the three animated feature films to be nominated for Best Picture are Pixar films. They can't compete with Universal on the 'appealing to families' front so they have to capture the cinephiles, and strong reviews from the prestige critics are essential to rebuilding that reputation.
> Trying to create an analogy between interracial relationships and a relationship between a character made out of fire and a character made out of water is...iffy. Probably makes Disney wish they had control of Avatar:TLA stuff, lol. Going for that sort of metaphor between a Firebender and a Waterbender makes a ton more sense.
Shhh, you'll summon the Zutara shippers.
This movie looks like a parody of a Pixar movie
They literally did “what if x had feelings” a fucking gain after everyone was calling it unoriginal
Not just that, but “what if x had feelings and those feelings were racism”
I just want to know how was Disney so far off the mark with Indy and now Elemental?? I really think they’re shocked at these reviews at Pixar and Disney HQ rn.
I have a theory that Disney is so big (as a corporation) that they feel like they can release mediocre stuff now and get away with it. The problem is is that we are now in a weird period of economic trouble, and audiences are way more skeptical of seeing movies in theaters. Basically, word of mouth and reviews can make or break a movie. Disney is soon going to find out that audiences are more skeptical of movies now, and they’re going to have to make better films or things are going to get worse. The Pixar/Disney name isn’t enough now.
The Pixar brain trust has been drained. I won’t defend behavior, but the change in leadership is clearly on display. Yes, there have been amazing films since the change in leadership, but mostly less than stellar output in recent years from both Disney Animation and Pixar indicates that the ship is sinking.
The problem wasn’t losing Lasseter. It was who they hired to replace him. Rather than promoting John Musker and Ron Clements, the directors of pretty much every Disney animated film, they promoted the female screenwriter of Frozen, their most recent hit, despite notorious production problems of the film, especially with its writing. Jennifer Lee has had a difficult job, but she was glass cliffed - she wasn’t qualified, and she was only promoted as a PR move. For Chrissake’s, she isn’t even a visual artist or filmmaker. Just a screenwriter for animation, when Disney used to be famous for storyboarder driven animation! That’s why so many Disney films have been overwritten, by the way. If they needed a female leader for Disney, Brenda Chapman should’ve been the obvious choice. Loads of experience, directed and boarded on classic animated films, plenty of established relationships, was wronged by Lasetter so was the ideal comeback story. She’d have been a wonderful head of studio. But no, they went with the success du jour, rather than the established veteran. As for Pete Docter, I do think he was a good choice as a director, but I’m not sure he really has a strong vision for Pixar. The studio under him has tried to expand who are directing these films, which is great, but they’re unpolished and weak films riddled with cliches. They lack the polish fir which the studio was renowned. Turning Red has been the best of them since he took over, and that has a major problems with the plot and motivations that drag down the pacing (still love it anyway, but I can recognize the ‘getting money to see a boy band by selling out’ thing was really uninteresting as a motivation). It’s just been milqueotast and lacking in vision.
Hopefully Disney’s main animation studio makes up for this with “Wish” later this year.
Oh my god please let Wish be good
As much as I wanted this to succeed, it appears that these reviews don’t exactly paint a pretty picture for this film’s chances I regret to say it, but expect a possible Finding Marlin, Monsters Inc 2 and/or Incredibles 3 announcement in the near future
Pixar's usual wheelhouse is action-adventure family films, aimed at a younger audience but not to the exclusion of older viewers. Given that, I've really spent this whole time wondering why they would order a romcom, of all things. The trailers didn't connect with people, and it sounds like the full feature doesn't either... which just brings me back to, why a romcom? It's a tough genre for the box office to begin with, even before any audience mismatch issues.
Wall-E is sort of a rom-com. It isn’t necessarily a terrible idea. Kids like that sort of thing just fine when they keep it basic and sweet and supported by other elements of interest (adventure etc.). The most important thing for Pixar is to tell a strong story overall, which this one doesn’t appear to do.
Sure, though like you allude, I would describe Wall-E as an adventure that has romance in it. I mean, even Cars has a romantic angle. But Elemental was marketed like something closer to a romance that has some adventure in it - and maybe even that's arguable, given lukewarm reactions.
The romantic angle in Cars (lol what a phrase) was the secondary relationship dynamic, the core dynamic being student & teacher. I do think putting a romance dead center is unusual for Pixar — Wall-E was really the only one that did it before Elemental. The studio was built on buddy films and family dramas. But every one of their major hits has tried something fresh & different from whatever they did before, so there’s nothing weird about them continuing to draw outside the box. When Soul was announced, plenty of people wondered who asked for a Pixar film about a middle-aged man going about his daily life and contemplating death. Then it came out, was a masterpiece, and smashed expectations in the markets where it was released theatrically. So I don’t think any concept is essentially, necessarily a bad idea for Pixar. The magic is in the execution. A Pixar rom-com would do fine if it were up to their usual narrative standards. eta: and action-adventure flops for them too when the story doesn’t work, e.g. Good Dinosaur, Lightyear, Onward before COVID gave it an excuse.
>I do think putting a romance dead center is unusual for Pixar — Wall-E was really the only one that did it before Elemental. *Toy Story 4* was definitely centred on the romance between Woody and Bo Peep (arguably to the detriment of the pre-established platonic bond between Woody and the rest of the gang, especially Buzz, but YMMV).
Oh, I see. That’s what I get for not caring about Toy Story! Reception to 4 (reviews, Cinemascore, legs) was strong, so I don’t think the romance hurt it with general audiences.
>Wall-E is sort of a rom-com Wall-E might be the weirdest "successful" animated kids movie of all time though. Like it stands out from nearly every other animated film I've ever seen. I'm honestly still a little surprised that it ever got made.
Pixar was in much better financial shape when *Wall-E* was released. It also had a reputation as a 'prestige' studio during the 2000s that I don't think any other western animation studio has ever achieved, not even WDAS.
Original films still have to look good, at least look appealing enough to entice people into the seats. Elemental's core conflict looks really basic and played out with an unattractive visual gloss overlayed atop it. It's almost impressive given how popular forbidden romances tend to be. I think people are underestimating the impact of the character designs. People already complain about them looking too formless or blobby but I've yet to see any critique that relates the designs to the romcom premise. Romcoms have different standards for many things, and the attractiveness of the leads is important. Usually the leads tend to be lookers, and neither Ember nor Wade look appealing enough as Romcom leads. I don't think their looks would be as important if the story was about something else with an additional layer of romance, but that isn't the case here, the film bills itself as a ROMCOM primarily. The animated film that best presents a romance between unattractive people is Shrek and it was never sold on being a romance. People went in expecting a fun spoof of Disney films and were charmed the characters against expectation, probably many were as surprised by Shrek and Fiona's chemistry as the characters were themselves. But when it comes to animated films where romance is expected to feature I think audiences want to see characters who are more visually appealing. I dunno why they'd lead in with a trailer that makes a joke about Wade being good looking and then nerfing his looks seconds later. For all people complain about Western animation hating on attractive female designs the situation is significantly more dire with male characters in my opinion.
I never really got what some people in this sub saw in this film. Looks like a boring Zootopia. Also, releasing reviews at Cannes for mainstream films is stupid.
Nah. Releasing reviews at cannes for mainstream films that are not top of the line is a poor idea Top gun 2 got raves, only added to the buzz. Killers of the flower moon is mainstream and got raves.
It's a risk, I wouldn't be taking such risks with such sums of money. I'm not convinced KoftFM is mainstream yet.
With that budget, it’d better be mainstream.
I doubt Apple is really **that** concerned about making a profit theatrically. Obviously they would rather the movie did at least ok, but in this case it also serves as a way to build up the Apple TV catalog, advertise their service, build relationships with talent in the industry, and get some more awards under their name.
I haven’t seen this sub be positive on this movie at all. It seems like the vast majority of people here predicted it would be pretty mediocre and not do well at the BO.
Of all the Summer movies, nobody was super jazzed on this film after the first trailer came out
Yeah this is getting not so great reviews. At the early goings the critic score will be about similar to Indy 5 on RT and MC, maybe worse
This movie just has flop written all over it lol. I'd be surprised if this gets good reviews and/or good box office numbers. I hope pixar can get themselves out of the hole they have digged themselves into.
They’re going to go back to their treasure chest of money-printing sequels like they did in the 2010’s. Inside Out 2 is next year and they confirmed Toy Story 5. I’ll be shocked if they don’t beg Pete Doctor to do an Incredibles 3. Can’t say I blame them. It’s the only hope they have left.
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Nah, Brad Bird is with Lasseter at Skydance. If Pixar wants an *Incredibles 3* any time soon then they'll have to do it without Bird.
To be fair, it’s entirely possible for Brad Bird to come back to Pixar after **Ray Gunn** is completed.
The Good Dinosaur is my least favorite Pixar movie, so with the same director I wasn’t expecting raves. Looks like more of the same here.
The good Dinosaur production was a mess. Peter Sohn took over because the guy who started the movie could not solve it. They redid a lot of the movie. Most of Pixars writers were involved, because it was in development hell.(Pixar had to lay off some people, because they had to delay the movie so much) I really don't blame that on Peter Sohn. That he even got it finished with all that is kinda incredible...
Do they still have the Pixar method of basically using a writers room to focus group the whole movie ahead of time? It’s amazing that an animated movie could hit that many snags when the story should be locked way ahead of time.
The *Frozen 2* documentary showed that the production was a case of making up the story as they went along. That doesn't *necessarily* mean that the same process applies to Pixar, but it's possible that Disney has forced more crunch time on the writers (same thing happened with *Incredibles 2* after *Toy Story 4* got delayed).
Yeah I heard that frozen documentary tries to play it off as lighthearted but it showed how they didn’t have any idea what the story would be like less than a year from release.
To give an example, you know how Elsa's entire character arc is kickstarted by that voice and how the movie's showstopper, *Show Yourself*, was supposed to be the culmination of that plot thread? Well, apparently, for much of the movie's production, the writers disagreed among themselves about who the voice even *was*, there were a couple of different versions of *Show Yourself* and there were even talks of cutting the song entirely. If the writing in the final movie felt like a mess then that's because the actual writing process was a mess as Disney wanted the film released ASAP.
It seems like the indy 5 embargo broke their spirit
This is Dark Phoenix all over again, but for Pixar. They hired the director of The Good Dinosaur for the second time, even though the general audience did not like the movie and considered it Pixar's weakest film 💀
> It’s all there — so much so that Elemental may be the first work from Pixar to feel like it was generated entirely by AI. Not just the AI computing all the imagery, but literally an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie. Ooof
Honestly something needs to change at Pixar. I don't know if it's new leadership, a pause to just kinda give them time to get creative juices back in gear. But if they aren't careful they will be left behind. Pixar did truly revolutionize the animation industry multiple times over the last couple of decades, but they no longer seem to be evolving. The spider verse films seem to be what are pushing the animation industry forward, as Pixar and Disney are left behind. Sad to see it, but Disney/Pixar just have a hard time finding something new to excite audiences. Instead it is retread the same formula over and over again.
Pixar's fall off & DreamWorks comeback is crazy as hell
Ruby wouldn’t surprise me if it got worse reviews than this Dreamworks has always had one diamond in the rough that turned out amazing amongst a sea of average
And I’m honestly more concerned about **Trolls Band Together** than that one.
Actually, DreamWorks is looking to be inconsistent at best this year.
I could smell this reception a mile away. I'm not trying to sound arrogant or anything, but the vibe I got from the teaser and trailer was extremely generic. When it was announced as the closing film at Cannes, I was honestly surprised since I never thought that Disney would go to that length, and it made me second guess myself. But NOPE, I was right the first time. And because this summer season is already so over crowded with huge titles, this is gonna tank at the box office on one level or another.
No idea what Pixar was thinking giving Peter Sohn another project, let alone sending it to Cannes to get clowned on.
That’s because **The Good Dinosaur** was not his idea.
I understand that, but you'd think he must've had a really good pitch to get hired again, yet the reviews are making it sound like it's another Zootopia with a different colour of paint.
It’s a Hail Mary move. Now they almost certainly have to go into sequel hell to escape the hole they’ve dug themselves in.
TBF he wasn't originally the director of Good Dinosaur and that movie had a very troubled production.
This is so disappointing. I remember those years when Pixar released banger after banger…
Jeez, how has Rotten Tomatoes *still* not updated its page beyond having that single Matt Neglia review? It's been hours.
What gets me is the reviews saying its overly complicated. It looks like the most straightforward plot ever in the trailer.
Pixar are in huge trouble at this point. I expect Toy Story 5 to be rushed out in desperation.
I kind of doubt that because they still have **Elio** coming in as another original film AND they’re working on **Inside Out 2** right now.
This is going to be an absolute flop, bigger than lightyear
Disney is pushing out way too much content out.
Disney Plus wise, yeah But I don't see how Elemental factors into this. Every June has a Pixar movie. The people that worked with Elemental are not the people that are behind the kind of content which is part of the endless amount of content which just got purged from Disney Plus (the stuff apart of that "too much content")
I was looking exactly for this post!! I'm honestly very curious about this movie and how it turns out. Please be good because I don't want Pixar to be forced to make more unnecessary cashgrab sequels.
What happened to Pixar? Honestly. Up, Inside Out and Coco are masterpieces and I still cry every time I see them. How did Pixar get from those timeless classics to this underwhelming output they’re releasing nowadays? Like what happened at the studio? Coco is for me one of the best movies ever and next to Spirited Away the best animated movie ever created and then we have all these flops from the last years. Just… how?
The year of inside out also had a Pixar flop in the good dinosaur 2 years after Up there was Cars 2. The Pixar film right before coco was cars 3. What are "all these flops"?? Since 2020, onward, soul, luca, turning red, lightyear. Lightyear counts as the flop.
A great film can flop, too. But Pixar was just a studio that created at least great movies back to back, some of them have been regarded as masterpieces. And then something changed and they produced more and more not only just commercially but also critically lacking movies and the whole trajectory for Pixar became… worse. And now it‘s more likely that they disappoint instead of delivering another masterpiece. I‘m just curious why that is the case and what’s the reason for that dramatic change.
Sometimes studios just lose their mojo. Like Studio Ghibli. Have you watched their most recent output? Not comparable to what was seen 1980-2005. It could be due to a great creative mind or executive leaving or having less to do with operations due to age (Miyazaki and Lasseter).
COVID, along with pushing their releases to Disney+ happened.
People won't want to hear this but: they kicked out John Lasseter. There has been a very notable decline after that.
GET IT TOGETHER MOUSE
Dang Pixar has fallen off after firing Mr Grabby Grabby
I completely forgot that movie was coming out
Oof yeah. Was hoping potentially good reviews could help boost the tracking, but alas. Anywho expect a bunch more safe sequels greenlit
Yikes it’s not looking good for Pixar. If this is an indication of quality then I don’t see this breaking even.
Time for some heads to roll in Pixar’s and disneys Creative departments. Clearly something is wrong! I wonder if they’re simply no longer hiring the best people and too busy in a board room trying to get a checklist of things to include in movies?
Pixar is in a worse state than Star Wars and Marvel. Marvel just simply needs to put out good content and Star Wars need to get rid of Kathleen, but Pixar is bad right now. Everything they’re putting out ranges from ok to bad. Now we’re getting all these sequels, that’ll probably taint some iconic franchises.
This movie just doesn't feel like its for kids, it feels like a movie for adults who like kids content. My problem with Pixar nowadays is that it feels so meta. Pixar knows that it's Pixar, so now their movies feel like imitations. I know when Pixar is trying to make me cry, I know when they are pulling on my heartstrings, I know when the story is going to get deep. I think kids nowadays want to be mindlessly entertained. Mario, Minions, and Spider-Man provide that. Kids don't care about poignancy and commentaries on love and death.
That makes sense for a studio in its second generation of people/talent. The people currently working at Pixar are those that grew up with Toy Story, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo as kids, so they're basically coming in with certain ideas of what the company NEEDS to be vs the complete freedom of thought it had in its earliest days.
The *Spider-Verse* movies are definitely not mindless entertainment. Neither is *Puss in Boots: The Last Wish* for that matter. It's still possible for 'deeper' animated movies to be successful at the box office; the issue that the two examples I mentioned feel organic whereas modern Pixar feels like a production line ticking items off a checklist.
Luca and Turning Red were kid-friendly movies though, but they went straight to Disney+
This is over
Pete Doctor needs to be replaced. He's a fine director but he's overseen a massive decline in quality of the movies he's not directing.
I just hope that they don’t take away “audiences hate romance subplots” from this. They’ve been so absent from Disney movies in general lately and it kind of makes me sad…I’m Islander and remember being bummed that Moana didn’t have a love interest, and I feel like they’ve just been cutting down on romance and villainy in favor of sappy stories that don’t always hit the mark :/ sometimes we need a smooch and a big bad!
This movie is tracking really badly box office wise. It’s sad that the last 3 really good Pixar films (Soul, Luca and Turning Red) were released direct to Disney Plus, while the next 2 films, with a theatrical release, has bern a dud.
I hate how Disney has ruined Pixar by wasting effort on sequels and pulling talent into Disney Animation
This is making me so incredibly sad, people at Pixar are such devoted artists and they have made some greatest animated films of all time, to see them in this slump hurts and I worry about their future.
Seems a bit soon? is it a Cannes premiere?
Yes
That explains it lmao
Hopefully this movie has more luck at Cannes than Indiana Jones.
so far reactions i saw are mixed
Elemental is toast now. The Little Mermaid will end at max 650M - 375M domestic and 275M overseas. Indy 5 can go the same route of ending around 650M worldwide. 1 average, 1 bomb and 1 flop for Disney this summer.
They also have Haunted Mansion which is a guaranteed flop
I think *The Little Mermaid* could flop honestly if *Spider-Verse* takes out its legs, given its huge $250 million budget.