Following the worst opening weekend box-office gross in the history of Pixar, the studio’s head honcho has today announced that Elemental will in fact turn a healthy profit once all of the Disney dollars are counted.
Elemental has performed in a manner befitting the elements at the heart of its story. It drowned with an opening weekend take of $29.5 million domestically and $44.5 million globally. Some put this down to middling reviews (read our take ★★★ here), a lack of marketing, or audience apathy based on the studio’s Disney+ release window for recent Pixar efforts.
However, two months on from release and Elemental has caught fire, raising its slow-burn box-office receipts to $148 million in North America and $425 million around the world. It’s a performance which has prompted Pixar President Jim Morris to tell Variety that it “will certainly be a profitable film for the Disney company”.
“We felt pretty good about the film. We had a higher hope for its opening weekend, so we were a bit crestfallen,” Morris added, “The numbers were falling off so little. In some markets, it would be a 12% drop from the week before and we had a handful of markets where [ticket sales] were rising. You just don’t see that in this day and age. You typically expect a 50% drop on an average basis. We thought, “Well that’s cool.”
He finished by saying that he’d “love to see it get to half a billion” but that “revenue from streaming, theme parks and consumer products” would ensure it turns a profit for the Mouse House.
Elemental is still playing in cinemas worldwide. Let us know what you thought of it by heading to our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
