Once upon a time, Pixar was invincible. From 1995 to 2010 they produced an unbroken chain of cast-iron classics like Toy Story, WALL-E, Finding Nemo, and Up, movies that deserve a place in the all-time cinematic pantheon.
Since then, they’ve had some successes, but it’s safe to say there’s been a gradual decline. Movies like Lightyear, Elemental, and Onward weren’t exactly flops, but they didn’t hit the heights we’d come to expect from the studio. There was a brief flicker of success with Inside Out 2, but right now it’s grim faces at the studio as Elio continues to crater at the box office.
Elio debuted in third place at the box office behind How to Train Your Dragon and 28 Years Later, making it the lowest-grossing opening weekend in Pixar’s history. Despite positive reviews, it seems destined to rapidly drop out of theaters and be consigned to the depths of Disney Plus.
The post-mortem on why Elio flopped will take some time, though a new behind-the-scenes revelation indicates that it could have been far worse. A new article in THR says the film was drastically altered late in the production process, with the original pitch seeing the titular character as “queer-coded”, reflecting director Adrian Molina’s own sexuality.
Alarm bells were apparently raised early on whether a movie about a “queer-coded” 11-year-old boy was a good idea, but things came to a head in summer 2023 when the in-progress movie was screened before a test audience in Arizona. Although those present claimed to have enjoyed the movie, they were asked whether they’d have paid to see it. Not a single person in the theater raised their hand. As THR says, this raised “alarm bells” for Pixar. Yeah, no kidding.
Remove the queerness!
The film was then gradually “sanded down” into its present form, with director Molina moved off the project and onto the upcoming Coco 2. Elio was then re-worked by co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi. All that led to some extremely unhappy Pixar employees who had been eager to work on a movie that celebrated a young male LGBTQ+ hero.
As former Pixar assistant Sarah Ligatich says: “The exodus of talent after that cut was really indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work.”
And, with Elio‘s thematic and emotional heart now torn out, the movie lost focus. An anonymous artist says: “Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing. The Elio that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian’s best version of the original.” With another saying: “[The character] Elio was just so cute and so much fun and had so much personality, and now he feels much more generic to me.”
It’s a sad fact that with the dawning of Trump ver. 2, Disney has decided to row back their progressive ideals. Multiple projects have seen LGBTQ+ characters either removed or altered, presumably in an attempt to quell the fires of conservative outrage. If Elio had been about a “queer” 11-year-old it would have been a huge target for right-wing media but, maybe, it’d have made more money. I guess we’ll never know.
