The UK Daily Mail served up more Hollywood hot garbage yesterday, running a story headlined, “Pixar suffers worst box office opening ever as $150M movie Elio bombs.” A cultural decoupling is in overnight delivery.
In case you never heard of it, Pixar’s hoped-for blockbuster, a sci-fi take on the much better How to Train Your Dragon, features a racially ambiguous, emotionally fragile boy whose friendship with a space squid affirms his tender identity and teaches him that being different is okay. The female lead, Elio’s aunt Olga, is a hard-charging marine who aspires to be an astronaut.
You could swap Elio for a girl, and the plot wouldn’t miss a beat.
No mythic trials by fire, no earned strength, no mastery of chaos, no growth through adversity. Elio doesn’t learn to stop crying and fight back. He learns it’s okay to cry. That’s the arc. No sword, dragons, or scars— just feelings. It’s therapeutic cinema masquerading as myth.
Who, pray tell, was this movie for?
Not boys, obviously. Not little girls, either. Aunt Olga, the story’s warrior, is unmarried. The message is clear: a strong woman doesn’t need a man— just a government job and an adopted child to emotionally co-regulate. It’s not that Aunt Olga was let down by a weak man; she never needed one to start with. The sub-message is: boys don’t need fathers. Militarized mother figures are fine. Boys just need to talk more, about their feelings. And they need hugs.
Unsurprisingly, the vastly expensive, emotional-passivity fairy tale with tentacled spacecraft is crashing harder than a malfunctioning squidship. Though it just debuted, it was the weekend’s worst performer. And the film earned only $14 million in overseas markets, for an abysmal worldwide total of only $35 million. Revenues always drop sharply after the first weekend. With a $150 million budget, barring some kind of box office miracle, it seems unlikely the movie could turn a profit.
One is tempted to speculate about how much USAID NGO money used to prop up this kind of malarkey. If you sniff the screenwriting air long enough, you catch the faintest aroma of government grant-writing language: “Promoting emotional literacy and inclusivity through intergalactic allegory targeting underserved youth.”
It’s the kind of narrative that wouldn’t look out of place in a USAID funding report, right between anti-extremism puppet theater and climate resilience TikTok influencers in Micronesia.
Oh well. They’ll have to pay for their own DEI consultants now. Too bad. But … is it time yet to bring back the Boy Scouts and unleash RoboCop?
