The Pixar animation Elemental continues to bring in profits, surpassing the overseas gross of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Upon release, Pixar’s Elemental was quickly dismissed as a flop when it opened domestically in the US to less than $30m back in June. The premature writing-off of summer releases because of slow opening weekends has been one of this season’s talking points, something we discussed here. Indeed, when Elemental failed to impress at the box office upon launch, its commercial performance was compared unfavourably to other animated features such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Elemental has continued to hang in at the box office though and has racked up some impressive stats too. The film has earned over five times its opening weekend haul, a testament to the impressive longevity of its box office performance and a clear reminder to not write films off based on their opening numbers.
Not only will Elemental make a profit for Pixar, the good news continues with the revelation that the film has actually overtaken Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse in the non-US market, earning $307m compared to the latter’s $305m. Considering that Spider-Verse's commercial performance was being used to criticise Pixar’s film, that’s quite the turnaround.
There’s been a lot of chatter about Pixar needing to transform itself as a company and there’s no doubt some truth in that. However, given the rather distressing reports emerging from the production of Sony’s Across the Spider-Verse (and the follow-up film’s subsequent delay) perhaps enough isn’t being said about the things that Pixar is doing to uphold standards in the animation industry.
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