Pixar boss Pete Docter on why Lightyear bombed at the box office

Lightyear was famously a box office dud, and now Pixar’s boss has revealed his theory as to why.

Lightyear lost money for PIxar. Picture: Pixar

Not long ago, Pixar was seen as untouchable. Every movie out of the animation studio was critical and box office gold.

From septuagenarian adventures and superhero families to ant colonies and rodent chefs, Pixar could make you laugh and cry – often in the same moment.

It took 16 movies and 20 years before Pixar experienced its first real box office disappointment in The Good Dinosaur, but the next release, Finding Dory, cleared $US1 billion.

But then the pandemic happened and the fallout assailed Pixar’s fortunes in a way it has yet to recover from.

Since March 2020, Pixar has released five movies and only one of them, Lightyear, has had a proper, uninterrupted cinema release.

It bombed. It earnt $US226 million from a reported budget of $US200 million. With marketing costs and cinemas’ cut, that’s a huge loss for Pixar.

In an interview with The Wrap, Pixar boss Pete Docter has provided insight into what went wrong with the Toy Story sort-of-prequel.

Pixar boss Pete Docter said Lightyear was asking too much of audiences.

“We’ve done a lot of soul-searching about that because we all love the movie,” Docter said. “I think probably what we’ve ended on in terms of what went wrong is that we asked too much of the audience.”

Lightyear was a high-concept idea. It works as a movie-within-a-movie that existed in the Toy Story universe as a film the character of Andy had watched and inspired him to buy a Buzz Lightyear toy.

It’s an action-adventure romp featuring the Buzz origin story, the tale of a space ranger who is stranded when a mission goes haywire. The Buzz in Lightyear is voiced by Chris Evans while other voice talents included Josh Brolin, Keke Palmer and Isaiah Whitlock.

But the twisty connection to the rest of the Toy Story universe wasn’t easy to explain, and Docter acknowledged the challenges that presented.

“When they hear Buzz, they’re like, great, where’s Mr Potato Head and Woody and Rex? And then we drop them into this science fiction film that they’re like, ‘What?’.

“Even if they read the material in the press, it was just a little too distant, both in concept, and I think in the way that characters were drawn, that they were portrayed. It was much more of a science fiction.

Pete Docter with Pixar producer Dana Murray. Picture: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

“And [director] Angus [MacLane], to his credit, took it very seriously and genuinely, and wanted to represent those characters as real characters. But the characters in Toy Story are much broader, and so I think there was a disconnect between what people wanted/expected and what we were giving them.”

What Docter didn’t mention in his answer, rather diplomatically, was the effect Disney’s distribution strategy may have had over Lightyear’s box office results.

When countries locked down in March 2020, Pixar had just released Onward, a family comedy adventure featuring the voices of Chris Pratt and Tom Holland. Onward had been in cinemas for less than a fortnight when cinemas had closed, and those days in release were already marked by a reluctant audience concerned about the uncertainty of Covid.

Like many cinema releases at the time, Onward’s release was shifted to digital platforms, first as a premium rental in late March, and then as a streaming title in the first week of April.

Soul was released on streaming.

At the time, Disney+ had only been on the market for six months in its initial launch countries, including Australia, and it was aggressively growing its subscriber base. The incentive of premium would-be-cinema releases proved a boon for the platform as locked-down audiences signed up.

Under former Disney boss Bob Chapek’s mission to hoover up as many Disney+ subscribers as possible, even at a financial loss, the next three Pixar movies were sacrificed to that strategy.

The Oscar-winning Soul, Luca and Turning Red all debuted on Disney+, despite cinemas slowly opening around the world.

The trend changed audience expectations of how family movies – particularly Disney releases – could be accessed. Even movies that had a cinema release had a shortened exclusivity window, which pushed audiences to wait for the home entertainment option.

There is now a reversal. The next Pixar movies – Elemental, Elio and Inside Out 2 — are expected to be returned to cinemas as part of a wider Hollywood reconsideration of the mix between streaming and theatrical.

Chapek was replaced by his predecessor Bob Iger, who has taken his foot off the accelerator on streaming as Disney looks to prioritise profitability over loss-making growth. And other studios such as Warner Bros Discovery has signalled it will re-energise its cinema strategy.