Just one year after Pixar delivered the highest-grossing American animated feature of all time, the studio has released its biggest financial dud of all time.

With early Saturday estimates now in, Elio is tracking for a $22 million opening, the lowest in Pixar history by a very wide margin. The previous low for a Pixar launch was the original Toy Story, which drew $29.1 million over its initial three-day weekend. But these opening figures are hardly comparable.

Toy Story, for starters, opened on a Wednesday, so it had already made $9.9m before its $29.1m weekend. It also played in 1,250 fewer theaters than Elio. Furthermore, Toy Story opened multiple generations ago, in 1995, when the average U.S. movie ticket price was less than half of what it is today. Adjusted for inflation, Toy Story’s three-day weekend gross would be closer to $60.9 million today.

In the modern era, the lowest-opening for a Pixar title is Elemental, which debuted with $29.6 million in 2023. The silver lining there is Elemental’s amazing multiple of over 5x. The film ended its run with $154 million. Assuming that Elio exhibits similarly strong legs, the film could potentially go on to earn over $100 million.

Even with an incredible performance, Elio will have trouble recouping its reported $150 million production cost. Studios often have a good idea in advance of whether a film will underperform, and Disney’s lack of heavy promotion for Elio indicates that they’ve been trying to minimize the financial loss on the film.

The film has a messy production history, as is often the case with Pixar productions. The original director, Adrian Molina, was replaced in early 2024, a switch that was revealed last summer. Two new directors — Madeline Sharafian (Burrow) and Domee Shi (Turning Red) — took over the helm.

Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter offered a vague reason last year for the switch: “I think [Sharafian and Shi] made some major discoveries on him that really helped the audience to connect and to move forward with the character into the second act, which is, course, where all the meat happens.”

All three directors get credit for the final film, though Molina’s credit is not placed upfront alongside Sharafian and Shi and appears later in the credits crawl.

Amid’s Take: I really want to see original animation do well at the box office, if only to dispel the foolish notion going around post-pandemic Hollywood that it’s become difficult to launch an original animated feature. That’s a fallacious argument for a couple reasons: 1) Hollywood rarely makes any non-IP original feature animation nowadays, and 2) what few originals they do greenlight are disconnected from the cultural mainstream and very obviously never going to be blockbusters.

Early Pixar’s greatest magic trick was creating family-friendly films that appealed equally to children and adults, with a brilliant combination of physical comedy and sophisticated themes. Key to those early successes were the studio’s limited use of children or teens as lead characters, which at the time distinguished its output from those of other studios. With the passage of time, the DNA of early “Pixar storytelling” has evaporated into the haze and all the lessons of those earlier films have been cast to the wayside in pursuit of new formulas that simply don’t work.

The studio now uses almost exclusively children and teens as lead characters, and their films look like they are intended specifically for confused, self-loathing children. The trailers for Elio have been an absolute mess of loud ambiguous characters, fantastical elements that are ungrounded in anything relatable, and heavyhanded themes that make the film look more like a necessary dose of medicine than a fun escape from reality.

Watch the Elio trailer and then the trailers for these earlier classic Pixar titles. Is it any wonder that audiences aren’t lining up to see Elio?