It may not be fair, but when the rubber meets the road, the box office take is what matters when a new movie is released. It doesn’t matter what the audiences that go to the movie actually think of it, or what professional critics think. What matters is if enough people spent money to buy tickets, and by that metric, Pixar’s new romance, Elemental, is already looking like a failure.
Elemental's Juneteenth opening weekend brought in less than $30 million, which is a record low for Pixar, at least when adjusting for inflation. It’s an infuriating result to see for a film’s opening weekend, because as I said in my Elemental review, it's actually a great movie in its own right. Its failure likely has little to nothing to do with its quality, and everything to do with business decisions that determined this result long before the movie arrived in theaters.
