At Pixar they cannot be happy at all, since just a few days ago Disney he laid off dozens of studio workers and no one would be surprised right now if the same thing happens again in the near future. The reason is that Pixar has suffered the biggest flop in its history with the release of ‘Elemental’, to the point that it has almost managed to eclipse the enormous disappointment that ‘Flash’ has been at the box office.
Worrying data
The studio itself expected ‘Elemental’ to start with 35 million dollars, a fairly low figure for a film that has cost 200 million dollars, but it has ended up making even less: $29.5 million. Much will have to be overcome in subsequent weeks and also in the international market, since there it has only been released for now in a handful of countries.
To those 29.5 million we must add the additional 15 million that it has entered into the other seventeen markets in which it was released this weekend. There it remained within the expected margin, with 17 million as the most optimistic forecast and 12 as the most pessimistic. They are still not good data, yes.
Nevertheless, ‘Elemental’ has several advantages over ‘Flash’ when it comes to softening the blow a bit. On the one hand, all those other countries in which it has not yet been released, probably because Disney wanted to reserve it for a more favorable date -for example, in Spain we will not see it until July 14-. On the other hand, animated films tend to hold up much better at the box office than other titles and their Cinemascore score is very good, which invites us to be moderately optimistic.
That does not mean that this first contact was bad, because ‘Lightyear’ arrived last year in North American theaters making 50 million during its first weekend and then it ended up being an unmitigated failure. And it’s that you can’t get the public used to seeing your new releases on streaming, which is what happened with ‘Soul’, ‘Luca’ and ‘Red’, and expect them to return to theaters like nothing else.
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