Why children's animations are doing so poorly at the box office

Elio , the new blockbuster from the animation studio Pixar, shows a boy who was taken from Earth to outer space. The cartoon itself, however, didn't take off.

The production earned just $21 million (around R$114.5 million) at the box office in the United States on its opening weekend and $14 million (around R$76.3 million) in the rest of the world - the weakest debut in Pixar's history.

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon grossed nearly twice as much, even though it opened a week earlier. And even 28 Days Later (director and producer Danny Boyle's zombie adventure, shot on an iPhone) drew more viewers than Elio .

What a difference a single year can make!

As of June 2024, Pixar's previous film, Inside Out 2 , has grossed nearly $1.7 billion, cementing its position as last year's biggest box office hit. And it wasn't the only one.

A report published by the British newspaper The Times in December described 2024 as "a new era for family films." For the newspaper, "the pandemic recession is officially over and a new box office lifeline has returned to Hollywood."

Other children's titles mentioned in the report were Despicable Me 4 , Moana 2 , Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Together, they grossed around US$6.85 billion (around R$37.35 billion).

While it's hard to argue with the numbers, one also can't ignore the fact that all of these films revolve around already known universes.

And by 2025, the biggest family films include A Minecraft Movie and the live-action versions of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon .

But Elio 's failure suggests that it's much harder these days to make a success of a film that isn't a sequel, prequel, remake , video game adaptation, or some confusing combination of all of the above.

It seems that among younger viewers, unfamiliarity breeds contempt.

Yes, there have been some profitable original children's movies in recent times, such as The Mean Guys (2022) and Robot (2024). But both of these are adaptations of books.

What we haven't seen lately are original blockbusters, the kind that sell toys and become Broadway musicals. The days of franchise-generating phenomena like The Lion King , Toy Story and Frozen seem to be long gone.

As journalist Brooks Barnes recently highlighted in the American newspaper The New York Times, Ruby Marinho: Teenage Monster , by DreamWorks, and Ducks!, by Illumination, were box office failures in 2023. And another disappointment that year was Wish: The Power of Wishes , the production that marked Disney's centenary.

In 2022, Disney's Strange World was one of the biggest box office bombs in history. Pixar's Onward performed poorly in 2020. And two other original productions from the studio - Soul (2020) and Red (2022) - went straight to streaming, on Disney+.

This phenomenon can be attributed, in part, to the covid-19 pandemic.

In some cases, films have failed due to a general decline in cinema attendance. Other films have not been released on the big screen. And people have become accustomed, during lockdowns , to watching new films at home.

But this is only part of the story - and "story" may be the key word.

The problem behind this issue is that the family films that failed in the 2020s don't have clear and engaging enough plots to appeal to viewers of all ages and attention spans.

Too many cooks

Elio , for example, is the sweet and joyful story of a lonely boy who learns to open himself up to friends. But its narrative wanders in a confusing way.

The film goes through many scenes until Elio leaves Earth and arrives at the psychedelic alien spaceship called the Comuniverse. Then, the film sends Elio to a villain's spaceship. And he returns to the Comuniverse.

Elio then returns to Earth. Then he's back in the Commonverse. Did I mention that he has a clone on Earth for part of the time?

With all this back and forth, it's no surprise that younger viewers aren't quite sure what he's doing and why.

The film's origins may help explain the issue. Elio was to have been directed by Adrian Molina, using ideas drawn from his own childhood on a military base.

But in June of last year, Domme Shi ( Red ) was announced as the new director. In August, Madeline Sharafian was announced as co-director. And the credits list three different writers.

In other words: perhaps this is a soup that was simply prepared by many cooks.

There are several other family films that were also written by different people and are very complicated. It is extremely difficult, for example, to summarize the confusing scripts of Soul , Strange World , Onward and upward , and Wish.

In the Pixar classic Finding Nemo , everything is much easier: the script is simply in the title.

What these recent films seem to have in common is the studio's nervousness about letting a writer-director tell a simple, funny story.

Animated films are notoriously expensive. Elio is estimated to have cost $150 million to make.

So it’s understandable that you’d want to continually refine a scenario, paying more and more writers to add new details to your fictional world. But this method of producing by committee is not the best way to craft an effective script.

"You might feel the need to have another script meeting where they solve their problems with a new layer of story or another dimension," says British producer turned film critic Jason Solomons.

"Even these smaller films are always extremely well thought out, but trying to tie up all their loose ends, nailing every joke and showing the transformation of each of the characters, sometimes makes it feel like the mechanism breaks down, in its effort to make everything work with the usual almost obligatory smoothness."

"Maybe a little bit of madness, a little bit of loose ends here and there, could do some good?" Solomons asked in an interview with the BBC.

None of this is to say that the many sequels and spin-offs that dominate the family movie market are models of well-told, economically-driven stories. But that doesn’t matter when the audience knows the material before the movie begins.

Movie-watching habits in the post-pandemic world now include much more chatting and scrolling on mobile phones than they did just a few years ago.

But viewers don't have to concentrate too hard to follow a remake of How to Train Your Dragon or Lilo & Stitch . After all, they already know what's going on.

The challenge for studios now is to engage audiences with stories they don't yet know.

Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Culture website .