As Tom Cruise once again wowed audiences with his insane stunts in a Mission: Impossible movie this weekend, Pixar’s Elemental impressed in another way at the box office: it’s still showing terrific legs. The film spent its fifth weekend in a row in the top five, Box Office Mojo is reporting. That brings the animated romance’s total to $125 million. For those keeping score, that’s more than last year’s Lightyear made in its entire run. It also surpassed 2015’s The Good Dinosaur (which was from Elemental director Peter Sohn), though it’s worth noting that Disney prematurely pulled that movie from many screens in order to ensure as many showtimes for The Force Awakens as possible.
And believe it or not, Elemental is now the biggest animated movie not based on an existing property since–wait for it–2017’s Coco. And yes, that includes 2021’s Encanto, which may have become a massive hit once it reached Disney+, but couldn’t even pass the $100 million mark domestically due in part to coming out when audiences were still adjusting to returning to theaters post-pandemic. Again, as we said last week, remember that many in the press were quick to pronounce Elemental “dead” as soon as it opened under expectations (that description, unfortunately, does apply to Ruby Gillman). This is a traditional Pixar offering, and audiences are liking it for that reason. So Disney has to be pretty happy here.
In the next two weekends, Elemental will face some competition for the family market with the releases of Barbie and Haunted Mansion respectively. However, both of those films are rated PG-13, with Mansion especially looking too intense for young children (and seriously, why is Disney sending such a Halloween-friendly title to theaters in July?). There won’t be another animated movie to steal its fire until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which doesn’t open until August.
Elsewhere at the box office, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny continued to do “fine” numbers, but the fact that this is the attempted resurrection of an iconic IP is why this isn’t being viewed as a success. In three weekends, Destiny has made $145 million, which is less money than Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made in its first five days. Take that however you will (maybe Destiny was missing Cate Blanchett’s sex appeal?). Is this truly the end of cinema’s greatest archeologist? Not quite, as Disney is almost certainly going to reboot someday (sorry, Harrison Ford), and will perhaps return to the franchise’s grittier roots whenever they do.
Finally, The Little Mermaid spent its final weekend in the top ten. With a tally of $293 million, it’s going to just squeeze past the $300 million mark before its done. Disney will be able to spin this into being a success story despite the insane price tag (they’ve already doubled-down by announcing a Disney Junior animated show based on it), but it’s still notable that crowds simply aren’t responding to this as enthusiastically as they have to past remakes, so maybe they’ll go in a different direction with next year’s Snow White (or maybe not).
Final figures are due tomorrow.