\n<\/p>\n
The headlines were murderous.<\/p>\n
Pixar, once regarded by film critics and ticket buyers as a studio that could do no wrong, had misfired so immensely at the box office that its future as a cultural force was in doubt. Pixar\u2019s creative spark had apparently blown out \u2014 poof.<\/p>\n
\u201cElemental<\/a>,\u201d the movie in question, has since made those insta-obituaries<\/a> look rather foolish.<\/p>\n An opposites-attract love story and parable about following your dreams, \u201cElemental\u201d arrived to $29.6 million in domestic ticket sales in June \u2014 the worst opening in Pixar history, by a mile. Little by little, however, the $200 million film became a hit, collecting nearly $500 million worldwide. For the year to date, \u201cElemental\u201d ranks No. 9 on the list of top-grossing films, ahead of Marvel\u2019s latest \u201cAnt-Man\u201d sequel.<\/p>\n Moreover, \u201cElemental\u201d has provided the Walt Disney Company, which owns Pixar, with one of the biggest streaming hits in its history. The movie arrived on Disney+ on Sept. 13 and had garnered 60 million views through Sunday, far surpassing results for Disney films like \u201cThe Little Mermaid\u201d and \u201cGuardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3\u201d for the same periods of availability, according to the company.<\/p>\n \u201cI had no idea what \u2018Elemental\u2019 was about, but we decided to watch it as a family because I kept hearing good things,\u201d said Rahela Nayebzadah, who lives in suburban Vancouver, Canada, and has two sons, ages 7 and 4. \u201cThe kids have been watching it nonstop ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Disney also expects to sell about 800,000 \u201cElemental\u201d DVDs worldwide. About 1.7 million people will buy a digital copy through iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other online stores.<\/p>\n Predictably, Pixar executives are doing cartwheels. But the \u201cElemental\u201d turnaround does not vanquish questions about the studio as much as raise new ones.<\/p>\n In a postpandemic, streaming-oriented movie marketplace, is the box office ceiling for original animated films simply lower? Pixar originals used to reliably take in more than $500 million worldwide \u2014 sometimes a lot more, including \u201cCoco,\u201d which collected $1 billion in 2017, after adjusting for inflation, and \u201cInside Out,\u201d which sold an inflation-adjusted $1.1 billion in 2015.<\/p>\n And if that is the case \u2014 if Disney+ has eaten into Pixar\u2019s theatrical audience \u2014 will Pixar need to spend substantially less? \u201cElemental\u201d cost roughly $200 million to make, not including marketing. To compare, NBCUniversal\u2019s competing Illumination Animation spent half as much to make its most-recent original movie, \u201cSing,\u201d in 2016.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Pixar will know more in March, when it releases \u201cElio<\/a>,\u201d an original comedic adventure about an 11-year-old boy who gets inadvertently beamed into space and mistaken as Earth\u2019s galactic ambassador. (Pixar\u2019s sibling studio, Walt Disney Animation, will also provide clues later this year, when its \u201cWish<\/a>,\u201d an original musical, arrives in theaters.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI hope we can continue to be able to have budgets that allow our artists to do the best work of their lives,\u201d Pete Docter, Pixar\u2019s chief creative officer, said in a Zoom interview. Hollywood as a whole needs to adjust its business models for the streaming era, he noted.<\/p>\n Pixar and Disney have spent a lot of time trying to understand the chilly initial response to \u201cElemental,\u201d Mr. Docter said. For a start, he said, Disney had undercut Pixar as a big-screen force by using its films to build the Disney+ streaming service. Starting in late 2020, Disney debuted three Pixar films in a row online, bypassing theaters altogether. Those films were \u201cSoul,\u201d \u201cTurning Red<\/a>\u201d and \u201cLuca.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere has been an overall shift in viewing habits as a result of the pandemic, but it\u2019s also specific to Disney+,\u201d Mr. Docter said. \u201cWe\u2019ve told people, \u2018Hey, all of this is going to be available to you on Disney+!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made \u201cElemental,\u201d to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn\u2019s immigrant parents inspired his film<\/a>.) Yet many of Pixar\u2019s biggest original successes, including \u201cToy Story\u201d in 1995 and \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts \u2014 \u201cideas that we all carried around as kids,\u201d as Mr. Docter put it.<\/p>\n What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?<\/p>\n \u201cI always felt that \u2018Elemental\u2019 would speak to a lot of people, and I\u2019m so happy it has,\u201d said Mr. Docter, whose credits as a director include \u201cInside Out,\u201d \u201cUp\u201d and \u201cMonsters, Inc.\u201d \u201cBut we have also taken another look at the projects we\u2019re working on now. What are the kinds of films we want to be making? I really think I want to double down on what allowed us to speak to audiences to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n