Disney is finally giving 3 streaming-only Pixar movies a theatrical release

'Soul,' 'Turning Red,' and 'Luca' are finally coming to movie theaters in 2024, after Disney previously dumped them on Disney+.

Disney is finally giving three streaming-only Pixar movies a long-overdue theatrical release.

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney chose to bypass traditional movie theaters and send three Pixar films in a row — 2020's Soul, 2021's Luca, and 2022's Turning Red — straight to Disney+. Now, those three films are finally headed to theaters, opening in early 2024.

Tickets go on sale Jan. 2, and a Disney press release says the move will allow families to see these films “the way they were meant to be seen.” Soul will debut Jan. 12, Turning Red on Feb. 9, and Luca on March 22, all as a lead-up to Pixar’s next release, Inside Out 2 (out June 14). In typical Pixar tradition, each release will also be accompanied by a short film.

Soul was the first Pixar film to debut on Disney+, premiering back in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. But when Disney announced that it was sending two additional Pixar movies straight to the streaming platform, it raised eyebrows among animation fans, especially when some non-Pixar movies didn’t get the same treatment. Encanto, for example, got a theatrical release, while Raya and the Last Dragon debuted simultaneously in theaters and on Disney+ for a premium fee.

Some anonymous Pixar employees grumbled to the press about feeling “lesser,” and the news quickly sparked trade headlines like “Why Does Disney Keep Sending Pixar Movies Straight to Streaming?” and “’Everyone Is Really Bummed Out’ Over Pixar’s Third Straight-to-Streaming Film.”

At the time, Turning Red director Domee Shi said she had mixed feelings about the film going straight to Disney+. Ultimately, she told EW that she wanted “the movie to be seen by as many people as possible.”

“When I think about how I developed my relationship with animation, how I fell in love with it was at home, was watching it on VHS, over and over again, pausing the movie, trying to trace over Aladdin's weird, beautiful face and trying to understand: Why do I feel this way?,” she said in March 2022. "The idea that audiences, that families and kids can have access to the movie immediately, and they can start developing that relationship already with the film and the characters? I think that's everything.”

Disney touted Soul, Luca, and Turning Red as major hits on Disney+, but some box-office analysts wondered whether the damage had already been done, especially as beleaguered theaters struggled to recover from the pandemic. In 2022, Pixar finally got another theatrical release with Lightyear, the Toy Story spinoff that opened to a healthy $50 million domestically. But the film proved to have short legs, leaving many box-office experts wondering whether Disney had trained audiences to just skip the theater and wait for the Disney+ release.

That doom-and-gloom narrative seemed to continue with Pixar’s next release, Elemental — at least at first. When Peter Sohn’s film premiered in June 2023, it opened to a soft $29.6 million domestically, a fraction of what other Pixar films like Incredibles 2 ($182.7 million) or Inside Out ($90.4 million) earned in their opening weekends.

Critics and box-office analysts were quick to dub Elemental a flop, but the film had surprising legs, earning millions week after week to rake in a healthy domestic total of $154.4 million. That puts it well ahead of some of 2023’s priciest live-action blockbusters, including Fast X (which only earned $146 million domestically) or The Flash ($108.1 million). In other words, Elemental is proof that family audiences are still buying tickets, especially when distributors keep movies in theaters for weeks at a time.

In November, Sohn told EW’s Awardist podcast that he was “heartbroken” by the early box-office numbers, especially because he and the crew were hoping audiences would connect with the film’s central love story and message of acceptance. But as the weeks went on, the director started to notice a surprising trend.

“When the film opened to those numbers, it just felt like, ‘Oh, people were not interested, or people weren’t connecting to it,’” Sohn explained. “So, I was heartbroken. It was a really dark time because you just want the movie to connect. But there was this sort of slow build. I started getting emails from some coworkers telling me, ‘Hey, something else is going on week to week here.’”

Ultimately, Sohn notes that “families did return to the theater," and he hopes Elemental is just the beginning.

“Pixar films still have that classic energy to bring people together,” Sohn added. “That’s what I hope people take away from all of it.”

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Related content:

• Pixar's Turning Red to go straight to Disney+, skipping theatrical release

• How the team behind Luca broke the Pixar mold to create a 2D-inspired summer dream

• Tina Fey reprises Soul character for prequel short film at Disney+
  

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