Pixar's Elio has an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score and 91% on the Popcornmeter, but it still bombed when it debuted on June 22 with a dismal $20.8 million opening weekend. Elemental and Mufasa: The Lion King were similarly written off as flops. However, the Pixar movie has made only $72 million worldwide to date, so a repeat of the surprise success those movies found isn't likely.
The Hollywood Reporter has published an in-depth article exploring what went wrong with Elio, and it appears that the movie we got was not the one the filmmakers originally intended to make.
The trade uses the example of a scene shown to the crew two years ago, which saw Elio collecting trash on the beach and turning it into homemade apparel. That included a pink tank top, which, according to multiple insiders, was part of plans to portray him as a queer-coded character (to reflect original director Adrian Molina's identity as an openly gay filmmaker).
Molina had no plans for this to be a coming out story as the title character is only 11, but Elio was made more masculine "following feedback from leadership." His love of environmentalism and fashion was dropped, as were any hints that he might have a male crush.
The movie's issues go well beyond those changes, though, as a test screening was reportedly held in Arizona in the summer of 2023. When the audience was asked how many of them would watch it in theaters, "not a single hand was raised."
Rumour has it Molina was hurt by that and the feedback he received from Pixar boss Peter Docter, leading to him being replaced by new co-directors, Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi, shortly after. Molina was offered the chance to remain as co-director, but left as a continued series of sweeping changes were made to his original vision for Elio.
It was Molina's departure that prompted Barbie star America Ferrera to walk away from the movie, despite having already recorded her lines. The budget, meanwhile, is thought to have ballooned to $200 million after Pixar decided to completely reshape the filmmaker's original story.
As one unnamed artist who worked on Elio puts it, "I’d love to ask Pete and the other Disney executives whether or not they thought the rewrite was worth it. Would they have lost this much money if they simply let Adrian tell his story?"
"It was pretty clear through the production of the first version of the film that [studio leaders] were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio’s sexuality of being queer," they added. "Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing."
That may be the case, but Elio still received a positive response from critics and those who watched it, so the bigger issue at Pixar might be figuring out how to get people to show up for these original stories.
However, the fact that Molina's vision was essentially decimated by execs suggests that the studio is no longer the creative-driven/filmmaker-friendly force it once was.
Elio is now playing in theaters.