Pixar Finishes the Story
A four-year story just came to an end this past weekend, with a familiar protagonist eventually emerging victorious.
For a time, life imitated art, as a beloved hero suddenly struggled.
Fortunately, rumors of the hero’s demise were premature and inaccurate.
After a literal battle with Anxiety, our hero emerges on the other side, changed but victorious nonetheless.
Pixar has finished the story. Let’s discuss how your favorite studio overcame the odds to rediscover itself.
Act I – The Glory Years
What’s your favorite Pixar movie?
That’s a question every movie lover can answer, but there’s no finite response.
The animation studio has released 28 films, most of them under the Walt Disney Pictures banner.
Throughout Pixar’s remarkable 29-year history of releasing movies, it has demonstrated stunning quality.
Every Pixar film has earned a Cinemascore of A-, A, or A+.
Cinemascore is a film industry service that asks opening-day audiences to grade the title they just saw in theaters.
For this reason, three Pixar titles never received a Cinemascore grade because they weren’t available in theaters. But that’s an Act Two topic.
The point is that audiences have adored every Pixar movie they’ve watched.
Even box office disappointments like The Good Dinosaur and Lightyear gained Cinemascores of A and A-.
Cars 2, the most often criticized Pixar movie, also claimed an A-, indicating that its detractors largely overstate the matter.
Also, since film quality directly impacts the box office, Pixar’s titles have become steady performers.
We can trace this starting in 2015 with the most important film for today’s discussion, Inside Out.
That moving movie about processing emotions earned $857.6 million worldwide.
Somehow, that’s not even a massive blockbuster for Pixar.
Instead, that honor goes to a couple of releases after Inside Out.
Finding Dory and The Incredibles 2, sequels to beloved Pixar titles, both crossed the $1 billion barrier.
The Incredibles 2 is currently Pixar’s biggest hit ever, earning $1.242 billion worldwide.
As I type this, the film is currently the 23rd-biggest blockbuster ever.
In the summer of 2019, Toy Story 4 added another $1.073 billion.
While Pixar released a couple of lesser films during that timeframe, most notably Cars 3 and The Good Dinosaur, the studio was rolling.
Act II – Disaster Strikes
People frequently joke that the pandemic felt like dog years.
While that’s true for everyone, it was likely worse for Pixar employees.
The pandemic impacted the studio dramatically, starting with the release of Onward.
On February 27th, 2020, I sat in a full theater and watched a sneak preview of this film.
A few days later, MickeyBlog published my review, which feels dipped in naivete.
I had no idea what the world had in store for all of us the following week, when Rudy Gobert regrettably touched some microphones.
Soon afterward, Gobert and one of his teammates tested positive for COVID-19, and their relationship was never the same.
Meanwhile, the rest of Western civilization shut down, joining our Eastern counterparts who had suffered a similar fate two months prior.
With the word on sabbatical, movie theaters proved unwelcome, as they innately violated the medical recommendations for social distancing.
Onward’s theatrical run officially started on March 6th, making it arguably the worst-timed film release ever.
Onward’s box office run ended 13 days later, and it was already available on Disney+ on April 3rd.
That’s the part of the story that still rankles some. Bob Chapek, Disney’s CEO at the time, quickly pivoted to build Disney’s streaming division.
Pixar bore the brunt of that decision, as its run of high-profile theatrical releases ended by default.
Three Pixar masterpieces – Soul, Luca, and Turning Red – skipped the movie theater altogether, debuting on Disney+ instead.
Turning Red’s fate proved particularly pitiless, as a planned theatrical release collapsed due to a late-stage COVID-19 outbreak.
By the time Pixar returned to theaters, Disney had unintentionally trained consumers to wait to watch titles on streaming.
Act III – Battling Anxiety
Pixar’s first two post-pandemic titles struggled in very different ways.
The unwelcome Toy Story spinoff, Lightyear, became Pixar’s biggest financial bomb, grossing only $226.4 million against a $200 million budget.
Last summer, Elemental started with the lowest opening weekend for any Pixar film, $29.6 million.
Thankfully, the underlying quality of Elemental gave it a fighting chance. Over time, it fought and clawed to nearly $500 million globally.
During the accounting examination of these two films, frustrated Pixar officials revealed their concern.
Unlike most movie studios, Pixar paid for the salaries of its employees via the profits from its films.
I won’t bore you with details, but the gist is that Pixar films need to make money. Otherwise, people get laid off.
In fact, Pixar just performed layoffs just last month! The timing proved regrettable, as we’re about to discuss.
I say this because Pixar officials have spent time stressing about the future since Lightyear and Elemental.
With the 2024 box office in shambles, exhibitors like AMC and Regal remain in financial peril, while Alamo Drafthouse just sold itself to Sony.
Questions have lingered about whether the box office would ever recover, a debate that has proven an existential threat to Pixar.
Pixar officials have indicated that if Inside Out 2 had failed, the studio may have needed to change its entire operations.
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Disney proudly announced that the latest Pixar film became the biggest global opener ever.
The sequel earned $155 million domestically, making it the second-biggest animated opening ever.
Last year’s headlines suggested that Pixar had lost its touch, as demonstrated by The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s success.
Well, Inside Out 2 just opened better than that film domestically and globally.
Pixar has battled its own anxiety and won.
Epilogue – Overcoming Anxiety
We may eventually remember Inside Out 2 as the film that saved Pixar.
I’m not being hyperbolic here. Pixar desperately needed the film to perform at least as well as Coco ($814 million worldwide).
That should happen, as Inside Out 2 hasn’t even opened yet in several markets.
Also, Disney has taken the extreme step of confirming a 100-day theatrical window for the film.
In other words, the soonest we’ll receive a Disney+ release is late September.
You can expect this to be Pixar’s new approach, and it’ll probably hold for all Disney animated releases as well.
Disney seeks to retrain consumers to watch films in theaters. The three-month exclusive release window does that.
Currently, Inside Out 2 has the 25th largest opening weekend of all time, falling $81k behind Rogue One—A Star Wars Story.
The sequel also garnered an A Cinemascore, and its Rotten Tomatoes score, which started at 89 percent, has since increased to 92 percent.
Importantly, the Audience Score is 96 percent, suggesting that this uncannily well-timed story about anxiety struggles is striking a chord with viewers.
I’m one of them, as I consider Inside Out 2 a masterpiece.
Importantly, movies are like baseball in that momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher.
After four years spent roaming through the desert, Pixar has just returned with a stunning cinematic triumph.
Inside Out 2 appears poised to become Disney’s first $1 billion film since the pandemic’s start.
Pixar has fought its own anxiety and come out stronger on the other side. So, there’s a life lesson here, too.
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