Pixar's Future Can't Rest on Sequels
The beloved animation studio can make serviceable follow-ups, but its success demands originality.
Inside Out 2 was a massive box office hit over the weekend. The sequel to the Oscar-winning Pixar movie made $155 million on its opening weekend, which made it the second-highest opening weekend for an animated film of all time (the first being Incredibles 2 in 2018 with $182.7 million). Given the box office success of Pixar sequels, it only stands to reason that the studio should keep making them, right? Toy Story 3 & 4 each made over a billion worldwide; Finding Dory also made over a billion. This is a foolproof way to print hit movies, so why wouldn’t Disney keep cranking out sequels? The studio’s four highest-grossing movies are all sequels.
But part of the issue here is longevity and originality. No one turns out for Inside Out 2 without the daring creativity of Inside Out. Pixar also needed a box office hit because while they released good movies during the pandemic like Soul, Turning Red, and Luca, they had no box office clout because they were released straight to Disney+ (brief theatrical re-releases failed to gain much traction because, again, these movies are on Disney+). But if every sequel or pseudo-sequel could garner traction, then why was Cars 3 the weakest-performing movie in the series? Why was Lightyear, a convoluted Toy Story spinoff, a flop? And most importantly, despite their box office prowess, why have The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory failed to leave the lasting impression of their predecessors?
Seeing Inside Out 2 this past weekend, I thought about those serviceable sequels and how being a good enough kids’ movie can lead to massive box office returns. I don’t think The Incredibles 2, Finding Dory, or the last two Toy Story sequels are bad movies. If anything, I’d say they range from good to great. Inside Out 2 is pretty good and does a fine job building on the first movie even if it doesn’t feel as fresh or as emotionally vibrant. Family movies this year are a wasteland within a wasteland. The general box office is in a slump, and it’s already difficult to find theatrical movies for kids. The Garfield Movie isn’t great, but it’s steadily chugging along because what other kids’ movie was there between May 24th when it arrived in theaters to June 14th when Inside Out 2 showed up? There is kind of a backfire effect to Disney+ where at some point parents would not like their kids to be at home all day, and Inside Out 2 can thrive because it gets families out of the house if only for a couple hours.
But what keeps Pixar strong as a brand that parents can trust is the studio’s originality and investment in new ideas rather than just being a sequel factory. Brushing aside Turning Red and Luca would be a major mistake because their lack of success is based on a clumsy release strategy rather than the content therein (if anything, the success of Inside Out 2 shows that audiences are more than happy to engage with the inner lives and dramas of adolescent girls, so Turning Red could have been a hit if Disney had trusted the material).
I think in the minds of some Disney executives and shareholders, the perfect machine isn’t Pixar, which rests on creativity and exciting ideas, but Illumination Entertainment, which stumbled onto the adorable Minions and now those movies make a billion dollars not because they have the best stories, but because they have cycloptic yellow beans spouting gibberish. And those movies certainly make money, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the plot of any Despicable Me sequel or Minions spinoff despite sitting in the theater and having those films wash over me.
The classics from Pixar are movies that stick with you, and they speak to a studio that’s willing to take chances because they trust their creatives and they trust the audience. Never in a billion years would Illumination make a movie about the emotional interiority of an 11-year-old girl. They wouldn’t make a movie about a rat that can cook. They wouldn’t make a movie about an old man who ties a bunch of balloons to his house to fly to South America. They’ll make a movie where Mario is voiced by Chris Pratt and he falls down a lot. It will make $1.3 billion, and it will be a great day for money, but not necessarily for movies.
Creatives and commerce always have to strike a balance, and if Inside Out 2 pays for the next big gambles from Pixar, then that’s great. But it’s not the “2” on the end that makes Pixar a success; it’s the name before the number.
Recommendations
I’ve recommended Molly Knight before, and I’m gonna do it again! I deeply loathe how prevalent gambling has become in sports. It feels very much part of an age where normal people feel like they need to get rich faster because wages aren’t keeping pace with the cost of living (see also meme stocks and crypto, which are other forms of gambling), and the Powers That Be are unhappy with steady returns on reliable products so they undermine those revenue streams with shoddy new sources like gambling. Professional athletics were already profitable and entertaining, but now online gambling is causing predictable problems.
MLB suspended or banned multiple players for gambling, and there’s no indication these guys will be the last. As Knight points out, you’re sending mixed messages if you’re slapping players for gambling with one hand and then encouraging gambling with the other. The notion that these streams are never going to cross is absurd, and it feels like only a matter of time before a major scandal comes along like a player betting on his own team’s performance in the World Series.
The 4K of It’s a Wonderful Life is only $13.69 (47% off). You need to have this movie during the holidays, so buy it like off-season clothing when it’s cheaper.
Note: I get a small percentage of sales made through my Amazon Associates links.
What I’m Watching
It’s always nice when I can make an easy recommendation where I have a sense that a movie I liked will also go over well with people who don’t necessarily share my weirder tastes. That easy recommendation is Thelma, which arrives in theaters nationwide on Friday.
The plot centers on Thelma Post (June Squibb), an elderly woman who is conned out of $10,000 when she receives a frantic call from a young man claiming to be her grandson. When she learns that her grandson is fine and that she’s been had, Thelma sets out to reclaim her stolen money. Writer-director Josh Margolin crafts an endearing tale about what it means to be diminished by age, but far from useless or helpless. The film draws a clever parallel between Thelma and her sweet grandson (Fred Hechinger) to show that just because a person is struggling in life, that’s not necessarily a result of age. The tricky balance is knowing when to ask for help and when to assert your independence. Thelma wraps this all up in a funny, charming tale that’s well worth your time.
A more difficult recommendation is Yorgos Lanthimos’ new movie Kinds of Kindness. I thought this movie was a blast, and yet the best way I can describe it is like Tales from the Crypt but instead of macabre horror, you have abusive relationships. The movie consists of three thematically similar stories with the same group of actors playing different characters in each story. I could get on the dark comedy wavelength here, but this movie is far more The Killing of a Sacred Deer than Poor Things. I love seeing these kinds of bizarre and twisted movies, but I also understand that more people would prefer to spend 98 minutes with Thelma than 2 hours and 45 minutes with Kinds of Kindness.
Over in television, we’re now halfway through the new Star Wars show The Acolyte, and it’s pretty bad. While it may not require you to have seen animated series like Ahsoka to understand what’s going on, Leslye Headland’s show feels painfully disjointed, especially compared to her previous series, Russian Doll. The first two episodes are a criminal investigation, the third episode is a tragic flashback, and the fourth tries to weave together comedy and trudging through a forest. There’s a seed of an interesting idea in here about The Force and questioning why the Jedi should be the arbiters of who uses it, but the show struggles to build on that. While I like the cast, I’d be surprised if the back half of the series can redeem what’s come before.
What I’m Reading
I’m still plugging away at multiple books, but here are some articles I’ve read recently:
Where Have All The Memorable Movie Themes Gone? Hollywood Composers Speak Out by Ben Pearson [/Film] - My pal Ben wrote a fantastic article about why there are so few memorable themes in recent movies. Speaking to current composers, there were a variety of answers ranging from the simple transformation of musical tastes (like how the pop music of today is different from the music of the 1980s) to culprits like an overreliance on temp tracks. What I like best about this article is that it doesn’t try to force an answer that we must have memorable movie themes again, but rather seeks to understand why film scores have changed over the past several decades.
There’s Something Different About Will Smith—or Maybe About Us by Stephanie Zacharek [Time] - The success of Bad Boys: Ride or Die shows that audiences will still show up for a certain kind of Will Smith movie. They may not watch Emancipation (the film he released between the infamous Slap and Bad Boys: Ride or Die) or any Will Smith action movie (like the flop of Gemini Man), but they still want to see him do his thing. What Zacharek wisely observes here is that we now see how difficult it’s been for Smith to maintain what appeared to be an effortless movie star charisma. At the worst possible time, the façade broke, and a side of Smith that he never wanted to show became ingrained in his image and legacy. While Bad Boys: Ride or Die shows that he can win audiences back, there’s no sailing past such a major marker in Smith’s career (and to the film’s credit, it makes a very good joke at the expense of that marker).
Behind ‘Suicide Squad,’ the Year’s Biggest Video-Game Flop by Jason Schreier [Bloomberg] - I’m always going to read Schreier’s reports on what happened behind the scenes of the gaming world (I’ve loved his first two books and can’t wait for his new one, Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment), and this is a great look into why Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League faceplanted horribly. From Schreier’s reporting, a major factor was that Rocksteady, the studio behind the terrific Batman: Arkham trilogy had only made single-player games; their expertise wasn’t in DC necessarily but in that single-player format. Asking them to tackle an online multiplayer shooter wasn’t in their wheelhouse. While there are a handful of lucrative “games-as-a-service” (so players are constantly paying for updates and new adventures) like Destiny and League of Legends, there have been others that failed to take root and at worst felt like a betrayal from a trusted studio such as BioWare’s failed Anthem. Suicide Squad falls into the latter category, but it’s not surprising that WB Games looked at the studios they owned, saw Rocksteady as the most successful (and with a DC-licensed game no less), and said, “Now do this DC game,” without understanding the underlying skills required.
Willie Mays Was Baseball by Ray Ratto [Defector] - The great Willie Mays passed away yesterday at the age of 93, and this is a lovely obituary about his impact on baseball, and why he was one of the greatest to ever play the game.
What I’m Hearing
There’s a new Decemberists album! I like it quite a bit! I remained baffled by long final tracks that have a great song and then go into odd ambient music before returning to a normal melody!
What I’m Playing
I’m in such a weird place with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I’m kind of chewing through these “Brutal” battle challenges, and I’ve found some incredibly helpful online guides, but they’re not foolproof (I am the fool, clearly). The hurdle is that in the current challenge I’m on, there are five rounds of battles. If you lose in any round, you have to go back to the first round. So I’m in this middle ground where I kind of have to psych myself up to play because I know I’m going to have to grind through the first four rounds again and try not to get demolished in the fifth round like I did last time.
I am fully aware of how odd this all is, and perhaps I should just move on to something else, but I’m a weirdo who will probably be playing this until Star Wars: Outlaws comes out at the end of August.