The Pixar method

A number of years ago, I picked up a book by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull (co-written by Amy Wallace), Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Part business book about organizational leadership, part memoir, part entertainment history, the pair charted Pixar's ups and downs as Catmull and his partners went from inventing some breakthroughs in computer technology to a developing proof of concept films to launching their first major animated movie, Toy Story, in 1995.

It's a fascinating read, but what's really stuck out for me has been Catmull's exploration of how Pixar approached its work as a film studio: they placed an enormous amount of time and work on developing their stories. It essentially boiled down to an iterative process, one where they keep working on the story until they understand the emotional core of what the story is about. It's why many of the studio's earlier films – Toy Story, Monster's Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up, and many others – have really stood the test of time: they're films that really tug on the heartstrings.

Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, and I was recently thinking about its recent run of films when I took my kids to see its latest outing, Elio, earlier this week. I wasn't sure if I'd really enjoy the film, and I was aware that I was only marginally aware of it. When we went out to see Lilo & Stitch last month, the theater aired the original teaser for the film from a couple of years ago, which listed it as coming out in 2024, and which showed off a film about a young boy who was abducted by aliens and put to the test of representing Earth before a consortium of alien worlds. Cute, but it wasn't something that I was moved to see.

As it turns out, the film is pretty good, and pretty far from what that teaser trailer showed off. I n the finished film, Elio is having a difficult time with life: his mother and father died in some unspecified way, and he's now living with his aunt, who's got a demanding job tracking satellites with the US Air Force. He's withdrawn, friendless, and is obsessed with the idea that aliens will come and abduct him to rescue him from life on Earth.

Spoilers ahead for the film.

When his aunt's facility receives a message from a consortium of alien civilizations (the Communiverse), Elio seizes on his chance and sends a greeting, disrupting the base's power and shutting everything down. He's quickly shipped off to an overnight summer camp, which reinforces his belief that he's just a burden to everyone, and closes down to everyone around him. When the aliens receive his greeting and beam him up to their meeting space, where he learns that they gather and look for new worlds to add to share their collective knowledge and wisdom with the galaxy. He wasn't the only new recruit: another alien, a warlord from a militant civilization, Lord Grigon, has also been making his case, only for the peaceful and meek Communiverse folks to reject him on the grounds that he's just too violent.

When Grigon doesn't take the news well and threatens to take over the Communiverse by force, Elio, faced with the prospect of being returned to Earth over this disruption, offers to negotiate with Grigon. He heads over to the warlord's ship, ends up imprisoned, meets and befriends his son, and escapes to try and renegotiate the safety of the Communiverse.

It's a cute film, one that reminded me quite a bit of the 1997 film Contact, right down to Carl Sagan opening and closing the film with some choice quotes. Both films ultimately boil down to some common points: the idea that we look into the stars for life because deep down, we're lonely and are looking for connections.

That's where the finished film ends up, which had me scratching my head, because that's not really the film that the teaser promised back in 2023. A lot of the same pieces are there, but in the teaser, Elio's abducted from Earth and meets the Communiverse, where he's essentially advocating to be included because ... he likes aliens and he's lonely? There are some notable differences too, the biggest being that Grigon is already part of the Communiverse and that the aliens realize that Elio was abducted by mistake early on.

Elio was supposed to hit theaters in March 1, 2024, but in October 2023, Pixar announced that it was bumping it back a year because of the actor's strike, along with a couple of its other projects. A little under a year later, the company made another announcement about the film: director Adrian Molina was being replaced by Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Madeline Sharafian (Burrow). TheWrap's Drew Taylor spoke with with Pixar's Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter, who noted that Molina was moving to another, "priority project" and that they "worked together to find other directors to help carry it across."

He also dropped another interesting note when asked if there were other reasons that the film was getting some new directors: “The character of Elio. And I can’t really even talk about it without giving away plot points, but I think they’ve made some major discoveries on him that really helped the audience to connect and to move forward with the character into the second act, which is, course, where all the meat happens.”

TheWrap's article notes some other changes that hint at a much greater re-tooling of the film's plot: America Ferrera was supposed to play Elio's mother, but she was replaced by Zoe Saldaña, who plays his adoptive aunt.

Both of those things reminded me of Catmull's book: under his watch, Pixar had emphasized the need and desire to go back to the drawing board when they found that a film wasn't working, sometimes scrapping entire projects because they didn't work or land with the emotional weight that they were known for. As presented in its earlier teasers, Elio felt like a film that was about a lonely kid who ends up getting abducted by aliens: a situation where he appeared to be a fairly passive character. He just happened to end up in this situation.

I think what happened here is that Molina directed the film, and when they had to push the release date back because of the strike, they took the time to look back at it and found that it was missing something: in the finished version, Elio feels like a much more active character, which I think is what Docter alluded to when he noted that as they were working on the film, they found some major things about the character.

Given that they removed his mother from the film, if I had to guess, they realized that they needed to give Elio some reason to be so isolated from everyone, and that while they had a lot of the film done, they had to do a bit more work to reconfigure it. Molina still has a director's credit on the film, but so do Sharafian and Shi.

That's notable: the Director’s Guild of America says that a director is entitled to that credit when they perform a certain amount of work on a project are specific reasons. Directors are entitled to producing a cut of the film once production is complete, and these rules are in place to ensure that a studio doesn't screw over a director by removing them prematurely. Given that Molina's still listed as director, it means that he did an extensive amount of work on the film.

But the version that ended up in theaters probably isn't Molina's cut of the film. Sharafian and Shi are listed as directors, which signals to me that they also put a lot of work into the finished product. In a lot of ways, I'm reminded of what Lucasfilm ended up doing for its two standalone Star Wars films Rogue One and Solo, in which they had fairly troubled productions before being handed off to another director to finish them up.

With Rogue One, Lucasfilm brought in Tony Gilroy to fix up what Gareth Edwards had shot, and reshoot to fill in the blanks. Gilroy was credited as a writer, while Edwards retained his director's credit. For Solo, Lucasfilm fired directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller shortly after production began, and brought in Ron Howard to finish up the film; Howard gets the director's credit there. (I'll make an unsolicited plug for you to run, don't walk, to check out Tansy Gardam's excellent podcast Going Rogue, which goes into a good amount of detail for this very issue.)

If I had to guess, Molina finished the film, and either Disney didn't like his cut, or when they realized they had another year to work on it, they went back and realized that it needed more, and Molina wasn't available or willing to go back and redo it. Given that he's co-directing Coco 2, I can't imagine that he ragequit the production, and this came down to timing and scheduling. Sharafian and Shi were brought onboard to finish the film, and did enough work punching it up to bring it up over the finish line.

I think this is notable because deadlines seem to be the ultimate arbiter for a film: studios will announce a slate of films, and while you do see some bumping back and forth as the studios move films out of the way (Elio was bumped back a week so that it didn't land at the same time as the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon), the creative teams have a set amount of time to produce a film. The thing is, films are complicated projects: you have hundreds of people working on them, which amounts to thousands and thousands of individual decisions that go into the making of each film.

In Creativity Inc., Catmull noted the importance of empowering the people in your teams to make those decisions on their own, relying on their expertise and knowledge in their fields, and while films are created under the eye of a director, there's still a lot of wiggle room for a story to change as it's being made: maybe an actor makes a certain choice with their character that changes how viewers see the story, or maybe there's a logistical thing that happens during the production that means that they have to change on the fly. When you are working towards a firm date, you don't have the time or luxury to really explore or implement those decisions. I think it's the one main reason why Marvel's films have become so lack-luster: they're just pushing to finish on time, shortchanging the special effects and story.

Last year, I wrote about why Dune: Part 2 was so much better than its counterparts in theaters: one reason that a VFX artist pointed out was that director Denis Villeneuve had a specific vision for the film in mind and stuck to it. They had spent a lot of time in preproduction figuring out those story beats, visuals, and had a good idea of what they were going to do once they got started – they didn't have to stop and recalibrate because they'd already done that.

It's something that I think viewers don't realize they should appreciate: it's okay to take the time for a script to cook and marinate for a while, rather than pushing a product out because a studio needs the film to fit a slot in the box office schedule. I've seen a lot of complaints from people on the internet about the amount of time Matt Reeves is taking to deliver a script for The Batman 2, something that DC studio co-director James Gunn noted was irritating: "It's going to come out when he feels good about the screenplay. And Matt's not going to give me the screenplay until he feels good about the screenplay."

I have a feeling that Elio was a good idea that didn't get enough time to marinate and go through that process that Pixar might have taken it through in its early days, and that they got lucky because they happened to have a delay forced on them by the actor's strike in 2023. The final film is a good one: maybe not quite on the same caliber of Toy Story or Wall-E, but it packs a solid emotional punch through Elio and is part of an underrated run of films like Lightyear, Luca, Onward, and Strange World. Hopefully it'll eventually find the audiences that it really deserves.

I've always been a bit skeptical of the idea that extensive problems during a film's production mean that it'll have trouble at the box office or that it'll somehow turn audiences away. This was an argument that I saw popping up a lot with films like Justice League, Rogue One, and Solo, and I don't generally buy it because a vast majority of viewers don't give a shit about FilmTwitter (or whatever you call it these days) or the inside baseball drama that winds up pundits.

That said, this online discourse can make its way out into the perceptions of a film, which is why the news that you're seeing about Elio isn't so much its reviews, but its lackluster box office performance: it opened to an opening weekend of $14 million, a low for Pixar, and it's sparked all sorts of dramatic headlines: "‘Elio’ Misfire Could Hasten Demise Of Original Animation," "Elio and the reason today's original children's films are flopping," "The Spotlight on Pixar Intensifies as ‘Elio’ Becomes Latest Original Animated Pic to Crash Land." The sky is falling for original films, but that's long been the case. Titan AE, which came out 25 years ago last week, was a big flop when it debuted, but it really caught on in that time and has become something of a beloved cult classic, if you want to go by the comments on a Facebook post that I made to mark the occasion.

I think Elio's problems aren't necessarily the fact that it's an original film (ie, not based on existing IP) or that Pixar has lost its touch: I think it just comes down to the fact that Disney did a shitty job marketing this film. That first teaser trailer didn't leave an impression, and it's really, really weird that as of a month ago, theaters were still airing it in front of another big Disney film despite the changes that the film seems to have undergone advertising it as a 2024 film in 2025.

But beyond that, there just didn't seem to be any push for the film: I don't remember seeing any news about anywhere: no interviews with the directors or cast, no teasers or pop up ads, or the usual bombardment of stuff that usually accompanies these types of upcoming films. John Gruber summed it up neatly in Daring Fireball by way of a post from Fast Company's Harry McCracken: "I wasn’t aware this movie had come out, and still can’t tell you what it’s about. And I’ve been a Pixar fan since before they made movies."

This isn't a hard film to advertise: it's Contact for kids, with a lot of cute aliens.

But I'm also thinking that there are other factors at play. It's been a busy summer already for films: Lilo & Stitch came out in May and has sucked up just shy of $1 billion in revenue, while the live-action version of How to Train Your Dragon has earned just under $365 million. Those films, along with Sinners, Minecraft, Captain America, Thunderbolts, Mission Impossible, Final Destination, and a couple of others have led to a box office that's raked in $4 billion this year so far, which CNN cites as 18% above what we saw last year (and we don't even have the biggest films – F1, Jurassic World Rebirth, Fantastic Four: First Steps, and Superman – hitting in the coming weeks).

My take on this: this isn't a problem with the film or its production: it's costs and exhaustion from moviegoers. This recent trip to the movies ran me nearly $80 – $25 for dinner at McDonalds + $31.28 for tickets and $22.01 for popcorn – just a couple of weeks after doing the same with Minecraft, Lilo & Stitch, and How to Train Your Dragon. (And we live in a pretty cheap market – I'm guessing those prices are pretty low compared to other theaters in more populated areas!) And because Disney dropped the ball when it came to marketing the film, and people either didn't know about it or didn't know what it was about.

With that schedule and those costs, I have a feeling that moviegoers – especially the ones with kids – are sort of cashed out, and dropping $80 on a film that you don't know much about? I wouldn't be surprised if parents would take the weekend and throw something on Disney+ instead and just wait for the movie to begin streaming in .... probably a month or two at this rate.

It's great to see that theaters have a really good selection this year. I love going to the movies, and I think that the success of a whole bunch of films bodes well for the industry for the moment. But it's frustrating to see this particular film's failure get reduced down to being an inherent problem with original IP. Audiences want new stories: look at the success of Sinners this spring. But even then, Disney's starting to look at their original films as potential seeds for greater franchises, which strikes me as a bad way to tell a story, trying to anticipate and shortchange your story to try and please a huge, four-quadrant audience. It's not the mindset that takes the sorts of daring and risks that real creativity demands. (Ahem.)

But I think they're being careful with what they're willing to actually spend money on. A new DC/Disney/James Bond/Marvel/Star Trek/Star Wars/insertiphere film means that you sort of know what you're expecting, and if you're going to spend a good chunk of money at the movie theater, you might as well know that you're going to go if you know you're going to have a good time. When you're not sure, you'll just wait until reviews come back from critics or friends and family (and run the risk that the film might not be in theaters anymore, given that they come in and out so quickly), or just wait until they hit streaming or home release.

That's unfortunate, because in the long run, these sorts of failures and headlines train studios to keep playing it safe and we'll see more Star Wars-type blockbusters and fewer films like Sinners or Elio. I want films that delight and excite me. Franchise films (and shows) can certainly do that, but it's an uphill battle to crest those expectations. Hopefully, Elio will end up being on of those films that has a slow burn, that'll find its audience through word of mouth. So consider this my effort to help there: it's a cute, fun film, and you should check it out (in theaters.)