Pixar Reportedly Removed LGBTQ Elements of Elio
It takes time to change course, and the road often becomes bumpy as you navigate a new path. Pixar seems to be learning this as it pivots away from some of the more controversial elements of its recent offerings. The animation studio’s newest film is Elio, which was released two weekends ago and is a big ol’ bomb, coming in third place in its opening weekend behind the live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake (which was in its second weekend – a big black eye for Pixar) and zombie sequel 28 Years Later (which was obviously for a different audience). It remained in third place in its second weekend, beaten once again by How to Train Your Dragon (ouch) and the new first-place champ, the Brad Pitt racing movie F1 (again, a film for a different audience). Currently, Elio sits at $73,931,624 worldwide, which means it’s nowhere near recouping its $150 million budget even before you factor in marketing and other costs, the theaters’ take, and so on. Elio did not just underperform; it’s a stunning failure for a studio that was once one of the safest bets in Hollywood.
How did this happen to Pixar? A new article from The Hollywood Reporter sheds some light on Elio’s troubled production, and it’s interesting to see how Pixar and maybe parent company Disney (and, God willing, the rest of Hollywood, but unhatched eggs and what have you) are shifting their priorities, even if they’re going about it the wrong way right now. Elio went through a lot of changes during its production, with the original director, Adrian Molina (one of the two directors of Coco), dropping out – or, if the insider accounts THR cites are true, being forced out – in favor of Madeline Sharafian (director of a short film called “Burrow”) and Domee Shi (who directed the short film “Bao,” which is the only Pixar thing mentioned here I’ve actually seen, and Turning Red). No one says for sure why Molina left Elio, but supposedly, after an early cut of the film was screened for the Pixar higher-ups in 2023, he got a lot of feedback from Pixar’s chief creative officer, Pete Docter, and by some accounts was “hurt” by Docter’s notes and left soon after that, reportedly after Pixar bosses decided he would “take a break.” After that break, he was told that Sharafian would be directing Elio, and he could serve as co-director with her, which he didn’t want to do. Also, insiders told THR that Elio’s budget was much more than the reported $150 million, going (to infinity and) beyond $200 million.
But the real meat and potatoes of this story concerns the changes Docter and, likely, other Pixar executives demanded. It appears Elio was once full of LGBTQ themes and imagery, with the title character – an eleven-year-old boy – being “queer-coded;” I’m not 100% sure what that means (it strikes me as one of those terms that can mean whatever’s convenient for a particular situation), but I think here it refers to a character that is not explicitly gay but is heavily suggested to be such. I gather this from some of the examples used in the THR piece, such as Elio picking up trash on the beach (another element of the early versions that was discarded) and selecting a pink shirt, or posters on his wall that suggested he was attracted to men. This all stemmed from Molina, who is openly gay, wanting to make a movie about himself, meaning he decided his self-insert that was defined by his sexuality would be a pre-pubescent child. Gee, I wonder why Pete Docter and the rest of the Pixar bosses decided this was a terrible idea and needed to be changed pronto; maybe they’re… what’s the word… sane. This brings to mind earlier stories – which are referenced in the THR article – about Pixar moving away from inserting LGBTQ topics into its productions, like when they cut a transgender subplot from their Disney+ series, Win or Lose. This comes on the heels of Lightyear (which made hay of a lesbian kiss in the press, for some reason) bombing and Elemental (which had a “non-binary” character) underperforming. (THR claims Elemental eked out a profit; under $500 million on a $200 million budget is, at the very least, cutting it close, and not what Pixar or Disney would have wanted.) And next year’s Hoppers supposedly ditched themes and plot points about environmentalism and divorce, although a source denies the latter.
Ending the practice of presenting themes and depictions of sexuality like this in kids movies is a good thing, of course, and unlike Disney, it’s nice to see that Pixar is serious about it. In fact, one section of the THR piece talks to a Pixar artist who said that, while Disney was presumed to have forced a lot of these changes on Pixar, it was actually Pixar that decided to stop pushing LGBTQ stuff, and that makes a lot of sense to me. Disney has shown no signs of slowing down on its indoctrination agenda and has been shown to hide this stuff from parents. But Pixar is actually making tangible changes, ones that piss off a number of its employees. A disgruntled member of an “internal LGBTQ group” called PixPRIDE said that a bunch of people working on Elio exited the production in protest after these changes were made and Molina left, and while other sources deny this, it’s a good thing if it happened. The only way for these studios to get better (if they even want to, and it seems Pixar does) is to weed out the activists posing as artists who are turning their films and shows into the equivalent of vans offering candy to lure in children. That’s how I know Marvel, for example, doesn’t really want to change; they keep bringing back the same people to make the same awful, preachy, joyless things over and over. Pixar isn’t afraid of pissing off its loony employees, and if they leave, so much the better. (When you’re at the point where internal groups of gay activists are forming within your company, you need to do some pruning.)
However, as I said, there are growing pains when it comes to this kind of change, and Pixar is experiencing them, with Elio being a prime example. The nameless Pixar artist told THR that once the gay themes and characterizations were removed, Elio became a movie “about totally nothing.” He’s probably right, and I suspect I know why: instead of starting from scratch and remaking the movie, they just cut scenes and dialogue from Elio and left it at that, which is a recipe for a mess of a film. The problem is that when Pete Docter and the others forced these changes, Elio was already cut and ready for viewing; they weren’t going to be able to redo the movie from scratch at that point, especially after a string of losses, even with Inside Out 2 being a big hit. What they should have done is caught these problems in the scripting stage so they wouldn’t have had an entire movie already mostly made. I don’t know how far along Hoppers was when they decided to cut the greenie stuff, but it may end up being another victim of Pixar’s new direction. Regardless, the heads of Pixar clearly want to fix the studio’s problems and turn it into a brand that parents trust again; their biggest hurdle may be shaking off the Disney stink they’ve got now that their studio is yet another acquisition of the Mouse House.
Let us know what you think of Pixar changing LGBTQ elements of Elio in the comments!
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