Things are not going well for Pixar at the box office. And for the most part, after being seriously vocal through backchannels to publications, the studio is now essentially silent. Lightyear is heading towards one of the worst flops in all of Disney’s history at breakneck speed. Really — the movie is actually performing worse than we had anticipated in terms of dropping from its already poor first weekend.
Lightyear grossed $4.25M on Wednesday (from 4,255 locations). Total domestic gross stands at $67.26M.#Lightyear #BoxOffice @Pixar @PixarsLightyear
— BoxOfficeReport.com (@BORReport) June 23, 2022
Just look at that paltry number. Lightyear dropped 27% from Tuesday to Wednesday without any new movie or preview coming out on the Wednesday. One day… 27%. There is no reason for the movie to drop like that going towards its second weekend except that it is being roundly rejected by audiences. At this rate, the movie may literally not reach $200 million in gross worldwide sales. That is something which is so hard to believe could be real given that this was a film projected originally to top a billion dollars across the globe.
And though Disney has been largely silent about the movie, there are some industry and “insider” leaks starting to happen which are, unsurprisingly, quite negative about the reality of the world. Still, I’m not sure how many of us would expect for Hollywood analysts to blame parents for wanting to screen material before their children watches it. Isn’t that called good parenting?
We should additionally consider unfortunate pushback over the film’s same-gender relationship from ultra-conversative families, who have also been educated for two years to expect Pixar movies on streaming sooner rather than later,” says Robbins, referencing Disney’s decision to send multiple Pixar titles to Disney+ since the pandemic. “The combination of those two sentiments seem to have instilled a ‘We’ll watch it before letting our kids see it’ mentality in some communities, particularly those with strict religious views, in contrast to the filmmakers’ intentions of championing equality and representation for everyone.”
— Shawn Robbins, Box Office Pro, Statements Given to THR
Darn those strict religious families for wanting to know what’s in their kids’ movies before letting them see it! Darn those ultra-conservatives for not wanting to explain how two moms can get pregnant to a seven-year-old.
Hopefully you can see the lunacy in the above two statements. Trust me, they’re sarcastic. But Robbins is funnily missing the fact that if it’s just “ultra-conservative” and “strict religious” families staying away, they must be seriously underrepresented in polling because they clearly make up the majority of the world!
There’s another quote from that article by Pamela McClintock that I really enjoy. Look at this and see if you can spot the spin:
Lightyear also under-indexed in the Northeast, where many locales are Democratic-leaning, as well as in Canada. It overperformed in the West and in the Southeast, including in many Hispanic-led markets. (Hispanics made up more than 30 percent of the audience.)
So the effort in this quote is to make it seem like different parts of the country came to see Lightyear in different percentages and thereby it proves the lesbian couple the movie revolves around were not a factor in the film bombing (they want it both ways). There’s just one huge problem. No, it didn’t overperform in the west and the southeast. It didn’t overperform anywhere. You can’t flop this badly and overperform anywhere. Instead, what they’re trying to do is use comparative statistics for a movie that did abysmal numbers. But it doesn’t work that way. Who cares if it did better as a percentage in the west versus the northeast? If the gross numbers are already in the toilet, the whole thing is a flush.
And as for the reasons… you don’t crash this hard without making a ton of errors. That certainly includes a backlash to Disney, making families have to do “the talk” with little kids by watching this, Turning Red giving families hesitancy, removing Tim Allen, a crappy premise, even worse marketing, less-than-average reception, and on and on and on.
We could be wrong though. Lightyear may have a resurgence and families may decide to go support this very “inclusive” piece of media as a way to affirm their love of pride and all things culturally momentous. That’s a future which could absolutely happen. But if the decline in sales from day-to-day over the beginning of this week are any sort of indicator, Lightyear may be heading for a greater than 55% drop from already very poor starting numbers. Usually films that open very low don’t drop that much because it’s just harder to drop significantly when you don’t have all that far to go. If Lightyear pulls it off, this is one movie that the market told loud and clear to “buzz off.”
Sorry Pixar. Maybe you’ve lost your mojo.
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