Who Killed Original Animation?
As 'Elio' flops with the worst Pixar opening ever, a Hollywood mystery examined
I find myself more than the usual amount vexed by the underwhelming opening of Elio. It’s not that I haven’t seen this lately — a solid or better movie failing to connect on its opening.
But the Elio result is Exhibit #4758 that some piece of this world is just gone. Kaput.
And the usual suspects on the why of that, I find very unsatisfying. There’s something deeper amiss, and until we understand what that is, we don’t have much hope of fixing it. This isn’t a canary in the coal mine — this is the caving in of the central air shaft that supplies oxygen.
So let us dive in then to The Case of Elio and the Mysterious Vanishing Original Animation Sector.
The Corpse
As has now been widely noted, Elio is just the latest in a line of original, non-IP animated titles that have opened poorly and/or failed to catch fire in this decade, during and post-Covid.
Here is the complete list of these titles with their domestic opening weekend totals and worldwide grosses.
Elemental (2023): $29 million opening, $496 million total
Migration (2023): $12 million opening, $300 million total
Encanto (2021): $27 million opening, $261 million total (hybrid release)
Wish (2023): $19 million opening, $254 million total
Onward (2020: $39 million opening, $141 million total
Raya and the Last Dragon: $9 million opening, $130 million total (hybrid release)
Strange World (2022): $12 million opening, $74 million total
Ruby Gilman: Teenage Kraken (2023): $16 million opening, $46 million total
So you can quibble with a title or two here. Can point out that Migration and Elemental clawed their way to respectable results; note Covid problems with the release of some of them, and make the case that Encanto, even with the weirdness of the release, is a clear success.
I’m happy to accept all those quibbles.
None of them add up to this being a sector that’s hitting it out of the park. For whatever reason, this is a genre that is… barely kept on the roster. To further the metaphor: At this point, management is probably preparing to have the conversation about sending these players back to the minor leagues.
So that’s all pretty bad, and we know all that.
In fairness, IP-driven animation is doing more than pretty well.
But original ideas is how this business keeps afloat — there is no IP without a great idea that sets a universe in motion. We’ll get into likely suspects about why original animated movies have faded in a bit. But first, what raises a detective’s hackles is how we got here and who’s to blame…