The weekend box office numbers are in… and the latest Pixar film, Lightyear, has only opened to no. 3, beaten by Jurassic World Dominion in its second weekend and Top Gun: Maverick in its fourth.
Lightyear’s total opening weekend gross, Friday to Sunday, is £3.7 million. This is still a better opening weekend than any other animated film this year. The Bad Guys opened to £2.4 million and The Bob’s Burgers Movie opened to £0.3M – Lightyear, in its opening weekend alone, has already outgrossed that film’s total of £1.0 million.
However, these numbers are still considerably low for a film with an estimated budget of £163 million – and it (mostly) comes down to how the film was (or wasn’t) marketed.
For the general cinema-goer, the pitch was confusing: a film in the Toy Story franchise that didn’t resemble a Toy Story film. When the film was first announced in December 2020 during Disney’s Investor Day conference, lead Chris Evans explained its concept on Twitter, clarifying that it wouldn’t be a Toy Story spin-off about the Buzz Lightyear action figure character but would instead be the movie in the Toy Story universe that inspired his creation. None of that information, however, had a presence in the marketing. Publicity for the film was played with a straight face. Disney advertised it to the audience as if they already knew its premise – and the inexplicable decision to not push such a unique idea front-and-centre of their campaign resulted in the audience being confused. When you withhold basic information from consumers, don’t be surprised when they’re not interested in your product.
Even amongst people who were in-the-know – obsessed Internet people such as myself – there was some scepticism because, despite being part of the Toy Story franchise, it’s not actually a Toy Story film and therefore can’t deliver the same experience or themes as a Toy Story film. Some of the resistance to it was because Disney seemed to be expecting us to show an interest simply because of the Toy Story connection, rather than giving us a reason to care about the film on its own merits.
If nothing else, the idea wasn’t emotionally intriguing enough; we already know what film inspired the Buzz Lightyear action figure: Toy Story. There is something of a shared feeling that revealing the film which inspired the action figure character within his own fictional world was to pull the curtain further back than we needed it to go. The Buzz of Lightyear may be the “canonical” version of the character but that’s irrelevant when he’s a different individual from the Buzz of Toy Story. The popularity of the latter doesn’t automatically translate into popularity for the former.
Another factor is Disney’s decision to release Pixar’s three previous films (Soul, Luca and Turning Red) straight-to-streaming. Whether it’s because they now assume the latest Pixar film to already be available on the service or not, that release pattern has conditioned some of the audience to associate the animation studio with Disney+, rather than the theatrical experience. This might not have impacted the film’s initial numbers on its own, but was enough when combined with the marketing not including the coolest aspect of the film.
The question now is how positive the word of mouth will be and how far it will spread, as well as the film’s re-watch value. The film was marketed poorly, confusing the uninformed with Disney’s decision to not explain the concept more explicitly. Those who were informed were themselves unsure for that reason, not convinced there was a good reason to see the film beyond its gimmick. But it is still possible for the film to succeed, it may just take more time than Disney likely expected. The next animated family film to be released is Minions: The Rise of Gru on 1st July – Lightyear’s third weekend. It’s likely, then, that the end of June is the cut-off point. It could be popular enough with what audience it’s found that it gets a lot of second viewings but if it hasn’t gained any serious momentum by the end of the month, then it really could be in trouble.
Alex Sigsworth 