Business
Pixar needs original animated hits. They're much harder to come by at the box office
For decades, Pixar could hardly miss with its original animated films.
Whether the subject was toys, fish or a cantankerous old man, the Emeryville-based computer animation studio churned out hit after hit.
But since the COVID-19 pandemic, Pixar and other animation studios have struggled to break through at the box office with the same kinds of original movies that defined the industry. Instead, sequels such as “Inside Out 2” have ruled the genre.
This weekend, Walt Disney Co.-owned Pixar will face its latest test with the release of “Elio,” an original film about a young boy who seeks connection with aliens to make up for his loneliness on Earth.
The movie is tracking to bring in $18 million to $25 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend, according to box office analysis. (The film’s reported budget is in the range of $150 million to $200 million.)
That would be considered a soft debut by Pixar standards, indicating the dilemma the animation business — and the movie industry writ large — faces with original content. While audiences often say they want to see new stories, box office ticket sales show they gravitate toward sequels, reboots and other familiar fare.
“You need to be launching new franchises to keep the pipeline fresh,” said Doug Creutz, senior media and entertainment analyst at TD Cowen. “Since the pandemic ended, original animated films have just been getting killed at the box office … no matter how good they are.”
Pixar executives, nonetheless, say they’re committed to telling original stories, which are key to the future health of the industry.
“You wouldn’t have Pixar without ‘Toy Story,’ our first original film 30 years ago!” Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter wrote in an emailed statement. “And while we also love digging into new layers of familiar worlds and characters through our sequels, I’d say there’s a unique thrill in unearthing a new story.”
Disney and Pixar’s previous original movie “Elemental” made just $29.6 million in its opening weekend in 2023, causing many in the industry to write it off as a flop, before strong word-of-mouth reviews propelled the film to a solid worldwide gross of $496 million.
Sister studio Walt Disney Animation Studios has also recently struggled with originals, including 2022’s “Strange World” and 2023’s “Wish.”
The pandemic had a major effect on theatrical attendance for animated films. At the onset, studios including Pixar put their new animated movies on streaming services to give families something to watch during the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and keep people from spreading the disease.
Movies such as 2020’s “Soul,” 2021’s “Luca” and 2022’s “Turning Red” were all sent straight to the Disney+ streaming service. Despite critical acclaim — winning an Academy Award for animated feature — “Soul” grossed just $121.9 million in worldwide theatrical revenue.
Even when movie theaters started reopening, families were slow to return due to health concerns and familiarity with watching movies at home, which dented animated films’ box office potential. Pixar’s 2022 “Toy Story” spinoff “Lightyear” did poorly at the box office partially due to this timing, as well as quality issues, marketing challenges and right-wing backlash to an on-screen kiss between a same-sex couple.
Other studios, too, face challenges with originals.
Universal Pictures’ 2023 original animated movie “Migration” also saw a soft box office total. The same year, Universal grossed more than $1 billion from “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” based on the Nintendo game franchise.
Last year, Universal’s “The Wild Robot,” which is adapted from a 2016 children’s book, debuted to strong reviews, but grossed $333 million in box office revenue, compared with the $492 million reaped by Paramount Pictures’ “Sonic the Hedgehog 3.”
Now family films are ruling the box office.
So far this summer, many of the films that have propelled the box office are family-friendly — Warner Bros. Pictures’ “A Minecraft Movie,” and live-action remakes “Lilo & Stitch” from Disney and “How to Train Your Dragon” from Universal.
Last year, Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” hauled in nearly $1.7 billion in global box office revenue last year, while Universal and Illumination Entertainment’s “Despicable Me 4” grossed $969.6 million worldwide and Disney’s “Moana 2” made $1 billion.
The common denominator among these films? They’re all sequels, reboots or rely on known intellectual property.
But industry insiders and analysts say that simply focusing on new chapters of existing stories risks making the animation space stale.
“If you’re trying to grow the business, you need new content, you need new franchises, you need new things for people to be excited about,” said Creutz of TD Cowen.
But beyond the box office, Pixar original films can get exposure — and drive business — through other parts of the Disney empire. Movies eventually debut on Disney+ and characters will show up on merchandise or in the theme parks, which can expand a film’s reach.
“Pixar is in the long-term business,” said David A. Gross, who writes a movie industry newsletter. “They want to create stories that last, and if that works in bringing back a sequel, great, but there is enormous value for streaming for these pictures, whatever they do in theatrical. There are a lot of revenue streams.”
Pixar intends to release three movies every two years, and the company’s strategy is to make one original for every sequel, company sources said. For instance, “Elio” was intended for release in 2024, but was delayed by the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. Instead, it swapped with “Inside Out 2” since sequels can be easier to move through the production process due to existing assets.
“Pixar was really instrumental in defining the look and the feel and the tone of computer-animated films,” said Christopher Holliday, a senior lecturer in liberal arts and visual cultures education at King’s College London, who wrote a book about computer-animated films.
The company “is now at one of those crossroads where they are trying to balance films that have an audience built into them,” Holliday said. “And then they’re also balancing their identity as a studio of innovation that is pushing the boundaries and the limits of computer animation.”
Next year, Pixar plans to release “Toy Story 5” as well as an original film called “Hoppers” about a new technology that allows humans and animals to communicate. In 2027, Pixar said it will debut “Gatto,” an original movie about a cat with multiple lives.
“We think audiences love originals too,” Docter said. “Sure, it might be a bit harder nowadays to break through all the noise out there, but if we do our jobs, and create something that people will love, we trust that audiences will show up.”
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
-
Crypto2 minutes agoBIS Report: Crypto Earn Products Resemble Deposits With No FDIC Protection
-
Finance8 minutes agoRising gas prices put more financial pressure on Latino households, study says
-
Fitness14 minutes ago
Jane Fonda was in her 40s when she changed the way we exercise
-
Movie Reviews26 minutes agoMovie Review: The Mortuary Assistant – HorrorFuel.com: Reviews, Ratings and Where to Watch the Best Horror Movies & TV Shows
-
World38 minutes ago
Meta slashes 8,000 jobs, or 10% of its workforce, as Microsoft offers buyouts
-
News44 minutes agoTrump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree to Extend Cease-Fire by Three Weeks
-
Politics50 minutes agoTrump Reposts Anti-Immigrant Tirade Calling China and India ‘Hellhole’ Places
-
Business56 minutes agoNike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan