Summer vacation blogging means low-hanging fruit. A Pixar film should do. The problem is, while I enjoyed Elio, there isn't an awful lot to discuss about it. Oddball kids united in friendship and shenanigans in colourful space settings are nice to see, but it's hardly new. The only unexpected part of this film was the focus on struggling parents or parent figures. Otherwise, Elio in its comfortable predictability is less easy to blog about than Turning Red or The Good Dinosaur, though I liked it better than both those films.
So let's return to the old angle of the box office. Since I last broached the subject, it has continued to puzzle me. I don't want to pan a film I haven't seen, but wasn't the success of Minecraft: The Movie somewhat surprising? I haven't seen a single good review of it. On the other hand, Thunderbolts*, appreciated by critics and by those who saw it (including me), did not draw the crowds. I know there's a gap between what critics and audiences like, but I'm not talking about snooty film buffs who abhor everything that isn't Bergman or Citizen Kane here. Popular YouTubers (well, most of them) enjoyed Thunderbolts*, but did it help the movie? did it heck.
And now, Elio, a good solid Pixar flick, has bombed despite good ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, while the lacklustre Moana 2 met box-office approval. It's hard to see a pattern here. Yes, there seems to be a fondness for "known IP", but Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was based on "known IP", and that was no help. (I've mentioned that it's good, right?) All whining aside, though, the disappointing audience figures for Elio at least provides a mystery to be pondered in a blog post. Why didn't people go to watch it?
To start with myself, I very nearly didn't go to watch it either. What put me off was that the story, judging by the trailers, didn't seem that engaging. True, there was an early trailer way back in 2023 (I think), which was worse, as the film then seemed to focus on a tiresome "Earth on Trial" plot (has anyone but Star Trek: Next Generation made that cliché work?). This story, I'm happy to say, has been scrapped completely, but maybe a few potential cinemagoers were scared off early. The later trailers, by contrast, looked nice enough, but had "good streaming content" written all over them. They didn't sell Elio as something you necessarily had to watch in cinemas.
In all fairness, maybe it's not, the magnificent visuals notwithstanding. I went to see it because 1) my summer vacation has started 2) I'm a mousehead who wants to keep Disney animation and Pixar in business 3) films aren't released for streaming as early as they once were, as Disney especially has become disenchanted with streaming services as a stable source of income and 4) it looked like a fun time. As it happens, Elio exceeded my expectations, though the story wasn't the film's greatest strength. It felt oddly paced at times, with the title character's orphan status being a particularly forced plot point which didn't elicit the pathos the film makers were perhaps hoping for. But I am glad I went and didn't wait around for months for the Disney + release.
What I appreciated most was the overwhelmed parent angle. As Elio's parents are both killed off (without explanation) before the story starts, he's living with his father's sister Olga, who has no family of her own and has to give up her ambition to become an astronaut in favour of her safe, earth-bound job in order to care for him. Elio picks up on how his presence has upended his aunt's life and draws the conclusion that he's unwanted. Aunt Olga's struggles to connect to Elio are paralleled, not very subtly, with those of the alien war lord Grigon, who doesn't understand his peaceful son Glordon at all, but who still loves him. The scenes where Elio and Glordon respectively finally realise how much they mean to their parent/parent figure pulled at my heartstrings far more than Elio's dead mum and dad.
Maybe here's another clue as to why the film hasn't done better. There's plenty of fun for kids, and something to chew on for adults, but there isn't much for the inbetween audiences. I'm not sure I would necessarily recommend Elio to teenagers and twentysomethings, at least not as something they needed to see at the cinema. For this middle-aged aunt, though, it did the trick.
