I’d forgotten about Pixar’s latest film, Elemental until I ran across this article today in Variety. According to Pixar’s president, the film may pull a profit or, at the very least, break even.

We last spoke about the high-concept animated feature during our Charting Pixar article. At the time of publishing that piece, Elemental had been the studio’s highest box office pull since Toy Story 4. However, that’s not saying much when you compare the sequel’s $1.2B to Elemental’s estimated $400M.

Elemental‘s production cost Pixar around $200 million to animate, which technically makes it profitable. That is, until you account for the undocumented marketing costs. The sloppy way of guessing the budget to advertise a movie is by using the same amount as the film’s budget, if not a little more in some cases.

Jim Morris, the studio’s president, spoke with Variety about the film’s slow burn to success. He does admit that Elemental opened below expectations, but he noticed that the film didn’t have the same audience dropoff rate seen with other theatrical releases:

“The numbers were falling off so little. In some markets, it would be a 12% drop from the week before and we had a handful of markets where [ticket sales] were rising. You just don’t see that in this day and age. You typically expect a 50% drop on an average basis. We thought, ‘Well that’s cool.'”

Although Morris is sure the film will “do better than break even theatrically,” he believes Elemental will be profitable thanks to other revenue streams:

“We have a lot of different revenue streams, but at the box office we’re looking at now, it should do better than break even theatrically. And then we have revenue from streaming, theme parks and consumer products. This will certainly be a profitable film for the Disney company.”

For those worried about Pixar being folded into Disney Animation or for the work to be shipped overseas, Morris makes it sound like things will be status quo for right now:

“It’s only us and Disney Animation that makes animation films in the U.S. anymore with all of the artists under one roof. We feel like having a colony of artists approach has differentiated our films. We hope to find a path to make that work. “Elemental” was particularly expensive because all the characters have visual effects. We had been getting the film costs down.”

Do you think Elemental will genuinely be profitable enough for Disney’s liking? Let us know below.

[Source: Variety]