Elemental Is A Hit On Disney+, But I'm Not Sure That's Actually Good News For Pixar

Pixar’s Elemental has been one of the more interesting movie releases of the year. After having a seemingly disastrous opening weekend, where it was beaten by The Flash (a movie whose own numbers largely failed to impress), it ended up putting up a solid global box office take. Now the movie has arrived on Disney+, and Elemental is continuing to impress as it has apparently seen more views on the streaming platform in the first five days than any other new movie in more than a year and a half. Elemental is also one of the top 10 Disney+ premieres of all time.

This news sounds amazing, and it’s certainly good news for Elemental because the movie is excellent and more people should see it. However, I can’t help but feel that it might actually be bad news for Pixar as a studio, as it’s yet another case of Pixar seemingly being relegated to streaming when the studio used to be a theatrical powerhouse.

Elemental’s Box Office Run Was Impressive, But Still Not A Big Win

The global pandemic hit all movie releases hard, but Pixar may have been one of the most poorly served studios. While many movies saw their films delayed until theaters opened, and others were released on VOD or streaming platforms at a premium price, Disney made the decision to release three consecutive Pixar movies, Soul, Luca and Turning Red, directly to Disney+, essentially for free. To some, it felt like Pixar movies were seen as lesser compared to other Disney projects like Jungle Cruise or Black Widow, which were initially available to watch on the platform for a premium price.

When Pixar finally returned to theaters, it was not triumphant. Despite the franchise connection and an A-list star in Chris Evans, Lightyear failed to ignite the box office. We began to openly wonder if viewers had been trained to watch Pixar movies on Disney+. So when Elemental, an original concept with no major star power, opened to a lukewarm box office, it wasn’t necessarily a shock.

But to be fair, what happened next with Elemental was not as expected. While the movie started slow, it saw a smaller week-to-week box office drop than most of its competition. Eventually it overtook The Flash in the global box office. Word of mouth seemingly got people who had initially dismissed it to give it a try.

Elemental now stands at $486 million at the global box office, and technically it isn’t quite done yet. But while that number is certainly solid and quite impressive considering how things looked at the beginning, it’s not as big a win as it might appear. Elemental is estimated to have a $200 million budget, and that doesn’t include marketing and distribution. So when it’s all said and done, Elemental may have succeeded in not losing money, but it also hasn’t made much.

The Disney+ Success Of Elemental Indicates A Lot Of People Still Waited For Streaming

What’s telling about the fact that Elemental set a record for a Disney+ premiere is that its 26.4 million views in its first five days are the most for a movie on Disney+ this year, but they are apparently not more than whatever number Turning Red received when it debuted on Disney+ in March 2022. Turning Red was the last movie that had been slated for theaters that Disney released on Disney+ instead, so Elemental’s viewership was on par with the last time people saw a Pixar movie on Disney+ right off the bat instead of in theaters.

Now it could be that a lot of those 26 million views came from people watching Elemental who had already seen it in theaters once. One of those views is my own when I showed Elemental to my daughter. I’ve now watched Elemental three times, and only one of those was in the theater.  What’s more likely, however, is that most of those views came from people who, for whatever reason, did not go see Elemental in theaters, and instead decided to just wait and watch it at home.

There are a number of reasons why people might choose to forego the theater. There are still a lot of people who still aren’t comfortable going to theaters due to the pandemic. A lot of people claim that the behavior of other audience members in theaters is substantially worse than it was even before the pandemic, and they simply choose not to deal with that. In those cases, I can’t blame anybody who makes that choice.

Still, I’m afraid there are just a lot more people who, when making the choice of what movies are “worth” going to the theater to see, have simply removed Pixar from that list. They watched three Pixar films on Disney+ during the pandemic, and maybe they loved them, but they also decided this was good enough.

What Does The Future Look Like For Pixar In Theaters?

There’s perhaps an interesting comparison to be made between two movies Disney released in theaters back to back. The Little Mermaid remake, released in theaters only a few weeks before Elemental, made nearly $100 million more at the global box office, but it saw 10 million fewer views than Elemental over the same Disney+ premiere period.

Perhaps most notable, The Little Mermaid made almost twice as much at the domestic box office than Elemental. Domestically, Elemental only made $154 million, barely more than the $118 million made by the atrociously-performing Lightyear. Elemental’s box office success has come almost exclusively from overseas markets.

But when it comes to Pixar, the domestic market is still king. Revenue from overseas markets is variable as far as how much the studios actually make, and the one other powerhouse foreign market for Hollywood, China, is rarely a place where Pixar movies find success. Even if Elemental is proof that the rest of the world is willing to go back to the theater to watch Pixar films, it may not be enough if the U.S. is not.

The issue here isn’t one of film quality, as critics and audiences do still seem to love Pixar movies. But if they stop going to see them in theaters, then it doesn’t make sense for Disney to keep releasing them there at all. We’ll have to keep our eyes on Elio, the Pixar film set to hit theaters next March. If it still makes it that far, how well it performs could do a lot to determining how Pixar movies are handled going forward.

Being a big hit on Disney+ is great, but it’s unclear what that really means for a movie like Elemental. How does Pixar take that into account when judging the film’s overall success? It would be a shame to see Pixar’s movies shifted to streaming alone. It would almost certainly mean a cut in budgets, which would in turn impact the talent that would be available to work on these films, and the quality of the movies is not in question.

As somebody who enjoyed the rollicking sci-fi adventure that was Lightyear on the big screen, and who fell in love with Ember and Wade inside a dark movie theater, I don’t think Pixar movies are the same when viewed at home. I’m glad people found Elemental. It’s better that it be seen and loved on Disney+ than not at all, but I hope all those millions discovering it for the first time wish they would have seen it sooner when it was in theaters.