Pixar is relying on Inside Out 2 to dig it out of a creative rut – but is it even in one in the first place?
Pete Docter, the director behind some of Pixar’s most beloved hits (Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out and Soul) is excited for the animation studio’s future. Not, though, for the reasons you might expect.
“I’ve been at Pixar for 33 years, and I don’t think we’ve ever been in a period of more turmoil and uncertainty than right now, which is kind of exciting,” the chief creative officer told Entertainment Weekly. It’s hard at first to disagree: Pixar arguably hasn’t had an industry-approved “hit” since Toy Story 4.
All hopes, then, are pinned on Inside Out 2. The studio’s first dyed-in-the-wool sequel since 2019, the follow-up to one of the most acclaimed animated films of the 21st century has already gotten stellar reviews. It’s tracking towards one of, if not the, biggest US openings of the year. “If this doesn’t do well at the theater,” Docter told Time, “I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.” No pressure.
But just how badly does Pixar’s course need correcting? Has a decade of greenlighting personal, original stories really painted its famous “Brain Trust” into a corner?
Hear plenty of people talk about Pixar’s last film, Elemental, and you’d think it had driven Disney to the verge of bankruptcy.
“We were all kind of gut-punched, and it was tough on morale,” Pixar president Jim Morris told Bloomberg. “I thought it was a good film with a Pixar feel, so when it didn’t work, that was like, ‘Whoa.’ I was thinking, ‘Do people just not want to see the kind of film we make anymore? Is that done?”
But Elemental did work. Despite some rather tepid reviews and Pixar’s lowest opening weekend in its history, word of mouth and a 100-day exclusivity window did wonders for the star-crossed rom-com. It ended its box office run a whisker shy of half a billion dollars – the 10th highest grossing film of the year worldwide.
Unfortunately, this means Elemental is responsible for nearly half the box office receipts of Pixar’s last six outings. Of those, Onward was released two weeks before the UK (and most of the rest of the world) went into lockdown. Soul, Luca and Turning Red were sent straight to Disney Plus. Lightyear’s bellyflop in 2022 was blamed jointly on an audience used to seeing family films at home, and a spin-off concept that proved difficult to explain to the average moviegoer.
It’s hard to see, then, where this “saviour of Pixar” narrative came from. It’s not really clear that the studio needs saving. Its last film made more than double its hefty $200m production budget. Before that, its last original film with a conventional cinema release, (2017’s Coco) made $814m. The only original films Pixar have released that failed to make money have been those not given their time on the big screen (and The Good Dinosaur, but we’re not really sure what happened there).
Still, the perceived failure of Pixar’s recent output has put corporate gears into motion. After cutting 175 jobs in May this year, the studio is reportedly on the look-out for guaranteed audiences. Despite Lightyear’s reception in 2022, that essentially means more sequels. Aren’t we lucky…
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Sadly, the company’s decision to move away from sequels following a dearth of them in the 2010s never seemed to get a chance to bear fruit. Soul, Luca and Turning Red might not have set public imaginations on fire in the same way as their predecessors. But then, can you name any straight-to-streaming film that has?
Anyway, Disney will take the lessons it wants to take from the last five years. And so, here we are with Inside Out 2: a wonderful, charming and imaginative film whose success might just cement all the wrong lessons in the industry.
Inside Out 2 is already being lauded as the film to save Pixar. For a company once famed for its originality, it might also just be the one to destroy it.
