Departing directors, ballooning budgets, and obeying in advance: not a great look.
The Hollywood Reporter posted a damning feature today, outlining the tortuous and torturous path Pixar‘s latest feature, Elio, has taken to the screen.
Apparently, Pixar panicked after a disastrous test screening in Arizona in 2023, where the audience averred that they liked the movie, but not a single one of them would pay for a cinema ticket.
This led to the studio mandating a full scale overhaul of the film. Original director Adrian Molina, who co-directed and co-wrote 2017’s Coco, quit, as did actor America Fererra, who was set to the voice the title character’s mother. Director Domee Shi (Turning Red) was brought in to take over the reins, with storyboard artist Madeline Sharafian joining her behind the camera.
Which is all pretty awful, but not wildly out of character for the film industry. but in the extra year and change (and with extra money allegedly poured into the budget, bringing it to north of $200m) that it took to finish production, all of Elio‘s queer themes and content were erased. And that’s a sticking point.
As originally conceived by Molina, who is gay, Elio was a “personal coming-of-age story about youthful alienation” that drew on his own experiences of loneliness growing up on a military base. And in that vision Elio, the movie’s 11-year-old protagonist, is queer-coded. But over the course of the film’s extended production, those elements were sanded off.
Disney, Pixar‘s parent company, aren’t shy about changing horses midstream, and this is not the first time an artist has been booted from a feature.
While Gareth Evans retains directorial credit for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, it’s no secret that Tony Gilroy radically altered the film during extensive reshoots. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were fired from Solo (and promptly won Best Animated Feature at the Oscars for Into The Spider-Verse). Even barring a sudden pink slip, creative freedom is not priority number one at the Mouse House. Director Nia DaCosta, whose next film, the sequel to 28 Years Later, is already in the bag, has talked about her difficulties making The Marvels as tactfully as possible.
But it seems that the issue here starts with Pixar, with one unnamed source saying, “A lot of people like to blame Disney, but the call is coming from inside the house. A lot of it is obeying-in-advance behavior, coming from the higher execs at Pixar.”
Pixar recently excised a transgender storyline in their first original animated series, Win Or Lose, which streamed on Disney+, and apparently the team on the upcoming film Hopper was ordered to mute any environmental themes. The creators of another unnamed project were told that divorce was a taboo topic, which is… well, let’s just say it strikes me as a wild overcorrection.
All this comes at a time when the LGBTQI+ community are suffering concerted attacks from the Trump administration, particularly the transgender community. The reactions on social media have not been tepid.
Writing on Bluesky, critic BJ Colangelo said, “I’m no longer shocked when the truths come out but my heart still breaks every time. Queer youth are attacked at every turn and they can’t even have the respite of feeling seen by a movie, all so regressive bigots don’t have to feel discomfort for two hours.”
At the time of writing, Elio is the lowest grossing Pixar release of all time, with a global gross of $72.3 million. According to one of THR’s sources, “The Elio that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian’s best version of the original.”
Elio is in cinemas now. For now.
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