8/10 Elemental might just end up being the last Pixar movie. There are two more movies in production now, but looking at these receipts, I can’t see any reasonable option other than to shut the studio doors immediately. At least the movie’s pretty good!

In Element City, a massive immigration port clearly modeled on New York City, inequity reigns. The water elementals, who arrived first, have claimed the best real estate and decided the most about the city’s layout, but the late-arriving fire elementals are mostly crammed into a slum across the river, unable to rise in the world due to both lack of economic opportunity and the physical danger the water-filled rich areas of the city represent.

Born into this environment, second-generation immigrant Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) stands to inherit the family deli from her father, Bernie Lumen (Ronnie del Carmen), who stoked an abandoned building into a blazing cauldron of the community, but he won’t turn it over until Ember learns to control her temper, and his body is beginning to fail. Investigating a burst pipe in the basement, Ember Lumen meets city inspector Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental who threatens to shut the deli down within the week over the problem, and the two fall in love as they investigate where the water, which shouldn’t be in Firetown at all, is coming from.

Elemental is a real “throw everything at the wall” effort, with the meet-cute, a noir plot that seems to echo Chinatown specifically in some spots, tension created by the lovers’ inability to touch each other, broad and heavy-handed metaphors for racism and income inequality and plenty of super-powered shenanigans baked into a movie about anthropomorphized elements.

The real heart of it, though, is Ember Lumen’s tension with her father, who explicitly sacrificed everything for her and has raised her to continue this sacrifice into the future even though she’d rather be a glassblower, a plotline that delicately navigates the pressures of Ember’s heritage and also the pressures of a customer service job that she isn’t suited for. It’s exactly the kind of sensitive and powerful emotional plotline that Pixar has made a name for itself with over 30 years.

The fire elementals carry signifiers of Italian, Irish, Jewish, Romani and Chinese immigrant groups. The metaphor Elemental is going for is clear, but flattening cultures like that is always risky. Also, they’re the only element that gets any signifiers like this at all – water elementals are clearly supposed to stand in for white settlers’ generational wealth and the danger they present to the Lumens is a metaphor for how hard it is for poorer immigrants to exist in wealthy spaces, but they aren’t identified as white with any of the vague racism we see applied to the fire elementals.

Humans of all skin tones can generally adapt to any environment on Earth, and no variety of interracial romance is dangerous. The fact that Ripple could kill Ember Lumen just by standing next to her, that it’s very dangerous for them to exist in the same spaces and they appear to need different cities from a functional perspective, paves over a lot of the segregation metaphors Elemental is going for. I knew that was going to be low-hanging fruit going in and didn’t want to pick at it, but the film wastes no opportunity to draw attention to the practical difficulties of its premise. It wants to have both the practical jokes about how they need to be separated and the metaphorical drama about how they shouldn’t be forced to separate, and I can’t be in both of those moods at the same time.

Elemental’s $29.5 million opening is the worst all-time for a Pixar movie and may represent not just a disaster, but a deathblow. The studio hasn’t had a real win since the half-hearted Toy Story 4 earned a perfunctory $1 billion in 2019. Elemental is its sixth release since that time, but only the third in theaters. Onward released March 6, 2020 and was hamstrung by the COVID-19 crisis, but its reception was lukewarm at best, and its other three original pieces were all released directly to Disney+. Rejecting sequels was part of the studio’s initial identity, which it has compromised on since being formally purchased by Disney in 2006, but even those aren’t safe bets – Lightyear, the only other post-pandemic theatrical release, is estimated to have lost $106 million in 2022.

A big part of the reason Lightyear lost money was its $200 million pricetag, and that, along with the knowledge that it would soon be on Disney+ anyhow, hampered Elemental as well – despite being a completely original production, Disney still spent $200 million on this thing!

The company seems to be approving budgets of around that number more-or-less blindly, confident that other revenue streams, or other movies entirely, will make up for a few misses, but the movie market has a ceiling. It can only support so many $200 million blockbusters, and with its barely-there marketing campaign, Elemental always seemed lined up to get the short end of that stick.

But when Disney decides Pixar doesn’t pull in enough cash, they’re not going to keep making the movies for Disney+ originals. Even early Pixar films were incredibly expensive, there’s no small-scale version of this that can be backed up to.

I fear this chapter of cinematic history will soon close forever.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.