Pixar is fed up with audiences. But instead of writing a polished press release and creating a beautiful behind-the-scenes featurette to express their feelings, the animation giant has decided to clap back the way Inside Out‘s Anger would: with a passive-aggressive meme on Instagram promoting their latest film, Elio.
In the short clip, a woman in her car delivers a line that hits a little too close to home: “Stop complaining that Disney doesn’t make original stories if you don’t show up to see them in movie theaters, and support them in the first place.”
Wow. You can almost hear the exhaustion from the animators and storytellers. But hey, can you actually blame them?
Elio, Pixar’s latest original film, just flopped really hard. With a production budget ballooning somewhere between $150 million and $200 million, it’s only made $72.3 million worldwide so far. That’s not “beloved cult classic” kind of money. It’s more like “we need to sell a lot of plushies to break even” pay.
The thing is, Pixar has been in a weird spot since John Lasseter left in 2018. Say what you will about the man, but under his watch, Pixar delivered one of the greatest runs of animated films in history. Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, Inside Out, and Coco. So, basically, hit after hit. Between 1995 and 2017, the studio didn’t miss.
But since then, the magic has faded.
Pixar’s latest original films, like Onward, Soul, Luca, Turning Red, and Elio, didn’t take off at the box office. In fact, many of them could be considered flops. Some were sent to Disney+. Others… just didn’t connect with audiences. At the same time, there was a strong demand for more sequels of popular IPs. Inside Out 2, for example, crossed $1.7 billion globally (it’s in 9th place on the list of highest-grossing movies of all time).
Where Pixar once bet on creativity, with talking rats with culinary dreams and robots falling in love post-apocalypse, it now seems more focused on pleasing execs.
So yes, Pixar is tired of audiences. They’re tired of being told “make more original movies” while audiences flock to the same four franchises over and over. And instead of quietly sulking, they’re turning to cheeky rants on social media.
Elio was released in cinemas on June 10, 2025. The synopsis reads, “Elio, an underdog with an active imagination, finds himself inadvertently beamed up to the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from galaxies far and wide. Mistakenly identified as Earth’s ambassador to the rest of the universe, he starts to form new bonds with eccentric aliens while discovering who he’s truly meant to be.”
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