John Gruber writes on Pixar’s latest film dud, Elio. He mentions the general lack of awareness around the film, noting it as a marketing problem in addition to the company’s string of unimpressive offerings.
My sense is that it’s not a marketing problem. My kids have a pile of Elio toys from recent trips to McDonald’s. We have a fair amount of kids programming streaming on any one day, and we were quite informed the movie was to be released this month. But that hasn’t persuaded us to see the movie (yet, at least), a trend easily visible in Elio‘s box office numbers. The movie has good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (83% as of this post), so it doesn’t appear to be an outright dud of a story.
Last summer’s Inside Out 2 was a decent film, although it didn’t have the same magic as the original (or many of Pixar’s earlier successes). Elemental was okay, but Lightyear and Turning Red were bad if not downright terrible. Coming-of-age tales like Turning Red are a common trope in film, but I can’t imagine many parents endorsing a movie that celebrates an outright disregard for parental instruction (and one that preceded the destruction of a large city).
So Pixar lost its way by producing mediocre films. Audiences no longer believe that Pixar films are creative and entertaining in the ways they were 20+ years ago. But there’s another shift: streaming.
For parents (a big driver of Pixar movie traffic, I’d assume), they’re no longer in a position of deciding whether or not they’ll watch a Disney film. The question is when and where you’ll watch a Disney film. If it looks to be a good one, then perhaps an outing to the theater is in order. If it’s good to mediocre or even terrible, then the decision is an easy one—wait for it to come to Disney+. And back to the marketing thesis — Lilo and Stitch has done very well in the theaters this year, and I suspect that this has sapped family movie budgets for now…another strong reason to wait to see Elio on Disney+.
(As an aside, I assume this is the same problem that Marvel releases have had lately. And I suspect that studios’ accounting has shifted to account for subscriber count in funding prestige films like this. You can’t simply have sequels when sustaining the Disney entertainment empire.)
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