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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Profitability is the new target in 2024. Not losing so much money on useless underperforming movies. Let's go through the recent Pixar flops in the years before since 2020.

   Onward (2020) - Budget:     $200 million
                 - Box Office: $142 million (Loss)

   Soul (2020)   - Budget:     $150 million
                 - Box Office: $121 million (Loss)

   Luca (2021)   - Budget:     >$100+ million
                 - Box Office: $49.8 million (Loss)

   Turning Red (2022) - Budget:     $175 million
                      - Box Office: $20.1 million (Loss)

   Lightyear (2022)   - Budget:     $200 million
                      - Box Office: $226.4 million (Tiny profit)

Apart from Elemental (2023) which was highly successful, there seems to be a string of more box office failures from Pixar recently and it being turned into a high cost factory. Disney saw the same and decided to let 20% from Pixar go.

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I think Onward (edit: maybe not, see comment below) and Lightyear were bona fide misses, but Soul, Luca and Turning Red were all released straight to D+ during the pandemic, weren't they? You can't judge their performance without internal Disney metrics then?

Onward almost made me cry over a van, I don't think it was a miss. Really surprised that it lost money! It really holds up on rewatches.

Onward was released March 6, 2020 - things hadn't completely shut down yet but Covid surely had a huge impact on its gross as well.

I'm in the camp that believes Pixar quality has fallen, and I'm not surprised at the recent losses (COVID or not).

Onward -- what a mess. The movie about walking pants. I could feel the churn of many story drafts they went through. It was a cool world and character designs, but the overall story just didn't land.

Soul -- full of emotion and beautiful, but didn't quite nail it. The pre-birth world has echoes of Inside Out, but not nearly as well-conveyed. In fact, the abstract art representations were a bit on the nose, and a rare case where I was too aware that these were ideations from the Pixar story team in the Pixar story room. Overall it had many wonderful sequences. But the main character journey was kind of odd. Joe loved music and it certainly seemed to be his source of happiness. But his lesson was that music wasn't necessarily his purpose and he should focus more on what makes him happy. ?

Luca -- adorable, but unambitious. The undersea world was so empty!

Turning Red -- ugh. What exactly was the character development? She is announced in the very first sequence as a confident individualist, and then her panda-journey teaches her to be... a confident individualist. Did no one notice this? Also, I'm bothered by the hubris of a first-time writer-director making the main character (and locale, and the time period) exactly themselves. I suppose if you need your stories to be biographical you can get away with it once, but it's poor form IMHO.

> it was about walking pants

It was about a son reconnecting with his father...and his brother.

RT 88% critics, 95% audience

Not many saw it, but those who did loved it.

> It was about a son reconnecting with his father...and his brother.

Yes, of course. But it (IMHO) had an opposite effect, where instead of strengthening the emotional impact of this is his dad, the character was reduced to comedy and pantomime (walking the wrong way, etc). Compare with the masterful non-verbal performance of Wall-E and Eve, for example. I mean, there's no way around the fact that the dad only being re-embodied from the waist down, was meant to be funny and silly. Instead of one last adventure between father and son, and showing us the strong bond that the child wanted to experience one last time, they showed us a running gag of wrangling a pair of pants.

Poignant situation with whimsical presentation is very, very much on-brand for Pixar.

Have you forgotten COVID already?

When Onward was in theaters COVID had already massively tanked attendance.

Soul, Luca, and Turning Red only had box office releases in countries that did not have Disney+, except possibly for very limited US releases (e.g., Luca had a theatrical release for 1 week in a single US theater).

In the countries where they did get a normal theatrical release if you compare them with Earlier big Pixar hits, they performed comparably.

If any one of them had been a 2019 movie instead of a 20222-2022 movie it would have easily made at least twice its budget and probably more.

Lightyear is the only real flop on your list.

So your imaginary grace period for covid effects extends until when, end of 2022 it seems like?

Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?

It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney.

> So your imaginary grace period for covid effects extends until when, end of 2022 it seems like?

Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were not released in theaters in North America except for one week at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for Luca and and one day there for Turning Red. They only got international theatrical runs, and then only in countries that did not have Disney+.

Maybe Disney lied when they said they cited COVID as the reason for cancelling the domestic and most of the international theatrical releases of those movies, but the fact remains that those releases were cancelled.

Soul only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.

Luca only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.

Turning Red only was in theaters in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.

Compare to the last Pixar movie whose theater run occurred entirely before COVID. That was Toy Story 4, and here are the countries it was in that Turning Red was not in: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

In the countries that both Toy Story 4 and Turning Red had theatrical releases in Toy Story 4 made $26 million and Turning Red made $11 million. If we assume the performance would have been similar had Turning Red been released in those other countries that comes out to about $420 million, which is indeed easily twice its budget just as I had speculated. Probably higher, but to get a more refined estimate I'd need to look at the countries it was in and see how their theater performance in general was compared to pre and post COVID.

For Luca it had $39 million in the countries it had in common with Toy Story 4. Toy Story 4 had $70 million in those countries. Assuming the same ratio if Luca had been in the other countries Toy Story 4 was in, that gives Luca a projected $560 million.

> Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?

It was the second most streamed movie in 2022 (Encanto was #1), which suggests of the theories that (1) people didn't watch it in theaters because they didn't want to watch it, or (2) people didn't watch it in theaters because it was not in theaters, the latter is much more likely. (BTW, Luca was the most streamed movie in 2021).

> It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney

That's a defensible argument in general (and since you comment a few have made that general argument), but not as an explanation for why movies that weren't in theaters didn't make a lot of money in theaters.

The problem wasn't Covid, the problem was Disney releasing them straight to Disney+ and not even putting them into the cinema.

I would be careful about Hollywood loss numbers. Disney is in it for the merch. That said, I wonder how those movies stack up to older greats like Cars, Toy Story, or Monsters Inc. They are only true failures if they fail to sell toys. Which considering I’ve never seen merch for any of these movies on the street tells me they probably have failed.

I’m near certain they fail compared against the original Pixar movies. Pixar used to make surefire films for the whole family. Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.

> Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.

Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.

I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.

If they were 100% in it for the merch they wouldn't be making the next Star Wars movie with Daisy Ridley as the lead.

If Grogu makes an appearance then it’s for the merch.

What happened to Pixar? Their storytelling used to be second to none. But most of their latest films have been so lacking that I haven’t even bothered to watch the last few. In fact, the last one I saw was Onward on the very day the theaters closed down for the pandemic. It was… okay. A bit of a disappointment. They have lost something special they used to have.

They lost John Lasseter to Disney.

He was an awful lot of what made them work.

> “They have lost something special they used to have.”

Mostly it’s that you’ve just grown older.

That, but also: the recent films have not been as good.

Re: Lightyear, a $226.4M box office return on a $200M production budget isn't even close to being in profit, tiny or otherwise. For one thing, a film's marketing budget isn't included in the production budget figure and in this case was probably $100M+ itself. Secondly, Disney do not receive 100% of the box office take. After the distributor's cut, it's probably closer to 50%. Films of this type need to make maybe 3 times their budget at the box office to break even, making Lightyear a spectacular flop.

Surely "Box Office" isn't the best metric to look at in any of those years? I get that it's hard to figure out what the better metric is, but are we all meant to pretend that theater ticket purchases are the primary driver of revenue for movie releases nowadays, even though it's obvious that can't possibly be true?

There is a valid question on how valuable streaming is long term. The theory that we would make content once and lock in profits forever seems dubious if everyone competes on last weeks content. Non zero interest rates also pull in profitability horizons by decades.

I agree! It seems super difficult to figure out whether a movie (or literally any media) is financially successful now.

But I don't think that's a good reason to give credence to a metric that strikes me as being incredibly obsolete. A bad metric is a bad metric even if it's unclear what metric to replace it with.

Domestic numbers for Turning Red have not been reported, and the movie is mostly streaming on Disney+. You can’t jump to conclusions about losses.

Also pay extra special attention to the warnings you find on the “sources” for this data: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets

“Note: Budget numbers for movies can be both difficult to find and unreliable. Studios often try to keep the information secret and will use accounting tricks to inflate or reduce announced budgets.”

If Disney was really losing that much money repeatedly, they would stop making movies. And yet they don’t stop, but they do keep making it look like they’re not very profitable. Why?

Most of these losses are self inflicted, considering Disney forced all these films to debut on Disney+ in an attempt to boost subscription numbers.

I'd be careful just analyzing reported budget and box office numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

https://www.statista.com/statistics/187076/tickets-sold-at-t...

US and Canada movie tickets sold in 2019 was approximately 1.2B. In 2020, it was down 80% to 223M, to 499M in 2021, and to 813M in 2022. Onward was the 7th highest grossing film in 2020, Lightyear was 15th in 2022. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=total..., https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2022/?grossesOption=total...)

Weren't Soul, Luca, and Onward direct to Disney+ because of the covid pandemic?

Your analysis is missing the elephant in the room.

I mean, these numbers are almost dishonesty misleading when looking in a vacuum. Onward released March 6th 2020. It was receiving mid reviews but it was very much on par to st least break even if theatres stayed open for more than 2 weeks.And Soul IMO is one of Pixar's greats completely screwed by circumstance, released in June to Disney+. I'm surprised it even crossed 100m to be honest.

I'm not in charge of business, but the curve of box office seemed to rise back with the waning of the pandemic. Even for the critically panned Lightyear, so it's not like the better movies did better. It's no secret that streaming services make nowhere near the revenue of a theatrical release, but Disney aggressively shifted so it could get its handle in as 2nd in the streaming wars. I figure that unprofitable movies were a price to pay there.

With those numbers, Lightyear was definitely not profitable. Published budgets usually don't include the marketing budget, which is usually the same or more than the production budget. Even if you're skimping on marketing it's still going to be at least equal to half the production budget.

Additionally, theaters take a cut of the box office revenue. Domestically they usually take about half, internationally the average is about 60%.

Edit: Looking at the numbers, Elemental probably only broke even or made a slight profit.

Some of those were released only on streaming services (Soul, Turning Red, Luca) so the box office numbers are really skewed.

They’re coming to theatres now, years after they were released.

Lightyear wasn't a success either when you consider marketing costs, which apparently makes it where you need 1.5x the budget just to break even, or so I've read.

Normally yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if marketing budgets were slashed with the pandemic as well. So all our usual rule if thumbs are out of whack.

A quick google says the general consensus is you need 2.5x the budget of the movie to breakeven.

how is it possible to have such huge budgets for animation movies???

can anyone explain what are the biggest cost drivers for pixar in spending 200+ mills on a movie??

Just watch the credits to see how much human labor goes into animation.

No kidding. Those lists go on forever.

So what, I could get a list of any free open source product contributors and get even longer list.

They dont work fulltime 40 hours per week on a single movie, do they? Its more like few hours here and there, as needed

> They dont work fulltime 40 hours per week on a single movie, do they?

Absolutely not.

They work 50+ hour weeks for 2+ years (discounting the much smaller team doing pre-production).

I don't know, but it will include...

A million for each main voice actor

$100k for supporting actors

Orchestral score (not many people can do those)

$50k per licensed song

Work on the "game engine" that supports the film (each film used to break technical ground... Fur in monsters Inc, hair in the Incredibles, etc)

Motion capture, clay modelling, 3D modelling, rigging, animating... everybody needs a studio quality machine and display...

The only thing I feel confident isn't a big chunk of the cost is the actual rendering.

Pixar famously spends quite a lot on compute for their render farm.

https://nofilmschool.com/why-pixars-24000-core-supercomputer...

A good video on what goes into a score for an episode of an animated TV show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiiDNusHdp0

It can get more complicated (and expensive) if you want to hire someone to play one or more parts for real.

To elaborate on some of the items others have mention, here are head counts for Pixar's most recent film, Elemental, based on the credits on IMDB:

    1 director
    3 writers
   20 voice actors
    5 producers
    1 music composer
    2 cinematographers
   12 editing
    5 casting
    1 production designer
    2 art directors
    2 production managers
   14 art department
   42 sound department
   85 visual effects
   68 animation
   46 music
    1 continuity
   77 additional crew

That's 387 people. These kinds of movies take years to produce (7 for Elemental), although not everyone works on them full time during the full length of production.

Just curious, what distinguishes a "visual effects" staff member from an "animation" staff member when making an animation?

Are "animators" doing the original character/flow design work and then visual effects people punch up backgrounds/lighting/textures etc. and doing the rendering?

Animators do the characters.

Visual Effects do wind, water, smoke, fire, cloth, etc.

I'm pretty sure these numbers don't even include the marketing budgets, which are almost always greater than production.

Turning Red was better than $20M. IMHO Luca was a bit of a stinker, but Encanto (Disney but not Pixar?) was really solid!

Turning Red released straight to Disney+ where streaming was available. So it's no surprise its box office revenue was crap.

Oh I disagree, Luca is great! But of course nobody saw it in the theater, approximately everyone who watches Pixar movies has a Disney+ subscription...

Was it? I never saw it because my wife and the kids saw it and they said it sucked.

Turning Red v Wish Dragon are both kindof Asian-oriented kids movies with pretty decent messages and "mature" topics if you watch them with an adult mindset. Those both kindof felt "cash grabby" but I didn't feel like I wanted my time back after watching them.

Luca (to me) was just so dull I barely remember the plot or message.

Encanto (v Puss in Boots Last Wish) both had a lot of "Soul" (Soul, and Inside Out being other really good animated movies), and I'd happily watch any of them again.

That’s funny. I thought Luca was the best, Encanto was mediocre, and Turning Red one of the worst kid’s movies I’ve ever seen.

afaik it's also related to how disney treats pixar movies differently. Wasn't Soul & others first movies released exclusively/or with priority on disney+? To my knowledge they'll reverse this in 2024, will see how this pans out

If I understand what I read recently about movie budgets, for big films like these they need to make roughly double that headline budget to break even. The budget does not include distribution and marketing. So even Lightyear was actually a loss

edit: (and incidentally Lightyear is the only one of these I've seen. I've got 3 kids and we used to love Pixar films but these days.. meh. Even though we've since had the third so still should be the same demographic).

Damn I really loved Soul

If budget is 200m and box office is 220m it means they have insane profitability. The movie will generate revenue for decades but is already paid up.

Btw, zippia.com says their revenue is 624k USD per employee. Layoff is needed: less than 1m per employee is unacceptable! /s

Not really. If you include the costs of marketing and distribution, a film needs to gross about twice its "budget" to break even. Furthermore, this rule of thumb only applies to US gross, where studios get much more of the actual ticket price (75% iirc) than overseas. In some markets, India for example, American studios get about 15% of the actual ticket-price gross.

There are quite a few numbers on the breakeven point but a quick google says it’s usually 2.5x-3x the budget - due to marketing cost and distribution fees.

To break even at the box office, you need to make at least 2.5x your production budget (so $500M for Lightyear). It's very unlikely that they were able to close the gap with streaming - the movie lost a ton of money.

The 2.5x multiple is because the production budget doesn't include marketing costs (which can easily be as high as the production budget) as well as the fact that they only get a percentage of the box office (the movie theaters need to live too). This is especially true for the non US box office, where the percentage going back to the studio is lower than in the US

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