News of Pixar's Demise Is Once Again Premature

Every once in awhile, I'll seek out these types of headlines. This one, as recently as last year, asked, Is the Pixar Brand Failing?

The article - written in the months before Up was released - goes on to quote a lot of stuff about metrics and how inflation is artificially raising the purported box office tallies. Specifically, it targets Wall-E and Ratatouille as indicative of this supposed "failing". But Wall-E cost $180M to make and domestically made $224M - a nice profit. Worldwide it made $533M. And when I look at the worldwide box office for Ratatouille ... look, I just don't understand how a movie that makes over half a billion dollars can be seen as a flop/bomb/failure.

The article quotes a New York Times story that stated, "Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for Up as a reason." And once again, this happens because short-sighted bean counters didn't see the potential. Up ended up making nearly $300M domestically and $727M globally, making it the studio's second biggest hit after Finding Nemo. It went on to be the second animated film ever nominated for Best Picture. Pixar's brand is definitely failing.

This weekend, Toy Story 3 garnered $109 million dollars. In literally four days. It's Pixar's biggest opening weekend ever, shooting past that of The Incredibles at $70,467,623. It becomes the eleventh Pixar film - out of eleven - to open at #1 at the box office. No Pixar film has made less than $160M, and the film that did that was A Bug's Life, which had the second-lowest budget of any Pixar feature and was released in 1998, when $160M was still considered a staggering blockbuster. Every Pixar film has been a critical and commercial success. Even its weakest film, Cars, received generally positive reviews, and has generated the studio's biggest merchandising revenue stream - as of last year, over $3M in merch alone. There's a reason why Cars 2 is currently in production.

I'm not sure where the almost rabid desire to see Pixar fail comes from. Professional jealousy? Good old schadenfreude? There was a big to-do this week about "the only two reviewers who hate Toy Story 3," which has received almost universal praise elsewhere. The "reviewers" - I'd hate to call them critics and demean the profession - didn't seem to have really seen the movie. One of them states boldly that, because real branded toys are used in the film, it's not a movie, it's an advertisement. The other one doesn't really discuss the film at all, focusing more on the MPAA rating and the budget.

So it seems that the people who are determined to see this studio take one in the chin are looking at the metrics, the budgets, the ratings, the inflation, the business. In all this, people seem to forget what drives people to Pixar movies: a good story that happens to be unique and universal at the same time. Good writing, good directing, good acting. That's it. That's all. It's simple and it's stupid, but that's the formula. Make a good movie and people will come see it. Maybe it doesn't work out that way for every film - a lot of deserving movies fail and a lot of crap succeeds - but it works for Pixar, and it keeps working for them.

$109 million in a single weekend. Is Pixar's brand failing? What do you think?