Elemental has now been added to Disney+, hoping for a better reception than it had at Cannes or on its opening weekend at US cinemas.
If you haven't followed Pixar's latest movie since its release in June, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was another notable summer flop alongside the likes of The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
Its opening weekend of $29.6 million at the US box office was the lowest Pixar debut since Toy Story, not adjusted for inflation. Elemental was even beaten by The Flash to the top spot with the DC movie making almost double that of Elemental in its debut weekend.
But then an unlikely thing happened. Whereas that opening weekend was about as good as it got for The Flash, Elemental refused to yield and sustained far longer than any box-office experts predicted.
If still not among Pixar's highest grossing movies ever, Elemental became anything but a flop at the box office.
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As of September 8, Elemental has grossed $154.2 million at the US box office and $330 million overseas to put it on the cusp of $500 million worldwide at $484.2 million, making it the ninth biggest movie of 2023.
That's ahead of fellow blockbusters such as Indiana Jones 5, The Flash, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. It's also the highest-grossing original animated movie since 2017, and the first since 2017 to even cross $400 million.
Whether or not it reaches $500 million in the coming weeks, Elemental has gone from its humble beginnings to be a hit at the box office. Were it not for the hefty reported budget of $200 million (not including marketing costs), it would be considered an even bigger success for Disney.
Its run at the US box office is especially impressive. Following its inauspicious debut, Elemental posted six consecutive weekends with lower than 40% drops week-on-week. In its fourth and fifth weekends, it dropped only 17% and 9%, respectively.
Such a sustained run is a rarity when so many movies are released and so much pressure is put on a movie's opening weekend. For Elemental though, its $154 million result is more than five times its US opening, a multiple that no other Pixar movie since Toy Story can match.
Internationally, Elemental has delivered the best numbers for a Pixar movie in recent years, even surpassing the likes of Lightyear ($108.1 million overseas), Cars 3 ($231 million overseas) and The Good Dinosaur ($209.1 million overseas).
In South Korea, the movie even became the most-viewed Pixar movie of all time with six million admissions.
A lack of direct family movie competition is partly responsible for Elemental's long run, but it's also down to an even simpler reason: people like it. At the time of writing, the movie has a 93% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, behind only Onward, Toy Story 4 and Coco.
While classic Pixar movies have more ratings, meaning also more negative responses (Toy Story has 250,000+ ratings compared to Elemental's 2,500+ ratings, for instance), Elemental is still ahead of other recent Pixar movies such as Turning Red and Lightyear.
Even critically, Elemental has rebounded from its initial Rotten Tomatoes rating of 57% following its Cannes premiere to a Certified Fresh rating of 74%. (As with Indiana Jones 5, Disney might regret the movie's splashy Cannes premiere, resulting in a negative debut with the critics.)
In the wider context of Pixar movies, you can't ignore the fact that even if Elemental gets to $500 million, it'll still be among the lowest-grossing movies for the studio.
As it stands, it's 17th out of Pixar's 27 releases to date and three of those (Soul, Luca and Turning Red) were only released in select overseas markets in the cinema where Disney+ hadn't yet launched.
But in the context of Elemental's release, it can only be seen as a success. It's not just that it sustained after a soft opening; it's that it proved that audiences will go to the cinema for a new Pixar movie, following a string of exclusive Disney+ titles that have almost left Disney having to recondition audiences to expect a new Pixar movie first at the cinema.
It certainly bodes well for Pixar's current 2024 releases of original sci-fi Elio and eagerly-awaited sequel Inside Out 2. But before those arrive, do yourself a favour and check out Elemental on Disney+ if you haven't seen it yet.
Elemental is available to watch now on Disney+ along with every other Pixar movie to date.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
