Animated Movies Bring Home Box Office Bacon - with a Side of Streaming
It’s been a hot minute since I wrote about animated movies on The Kids StreamerSphere. And by hot minute, I mean nearly a year. A YEAR!!! Apologies folks, I went down a massive preschool-series hole. First Gabby’s Dollhouse, then the history of Bluey and CoComelon. Throw in a smattering of Netflix earnings notes and that’s plenty of insights for a gal to pump out alongside a couple of day jobs.
Lots has been happening on animated movies, from both a theatrical and a streaming point of view. It’s a Minion-Puss-in-Mario-Elementalpalooza.
Last time we spoke at length on animated movies, it was November 2022. Remember then? Bruises from the pandemic felt fresh for people and businesses alike. In terms of the media industry, 2022 was very much a recovery year, tentative at first, but gaining confidence as time went on. Since then there have been highs (The Super Mario Bros. Movie), a few lows (Strange World, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, and all Netflix Original animated features released so far this year), and plenty in between. When we think of the animated slate that was subject to hyper pandemic forces, here’s how it stacked up:
In exiting the pandemic, the Christmas 2021 theatrical release date for Illumination’s Sing 2 was a full year later than initially planned. As the sequel to an original which grossed over $634 million globally, expectations would have been hard to quell. Illumination’s sister studio, DreamWorks, had plenty of learnings from experimenting with COVID-era release strategies, which may have helped inform decisions.
It’s not surprising that during this period Disney took a more conservative approach with their own high-profile, holiday-timed feature, Encanto. Their whole strategy during the pandemic era was more cautious, plus they had gone all-in on their new global streaming platform. Encanto would see limited theatrical release around Thanksgiving 2021, then a tidy window to Disney+ in time for Christmas. Viewer engagement there for animated Pixar titles Soul and Luca had proven very compelling. Encanto would go on to set a new gold standard, a true unicorn (see below chart).
The question is whether they should have been more confident in going theatrical with Pixar’s Turning Red. Donning full Captain Hindsight regalia, the answer is most certainly yes. Judging by the box office dollars driven by Sing 2 and The Bad Guys, Turning Red conclusively left money on the table. The Pixar film would see excellent numbers on streaming but Sing 2 has demonstrated that the right film can do both.
Summer 2022 would see confidence coming back to cinema-going. In what would usually be considered a real studio showdown, Illumination were releasing Minions: The Rise of Gru, with Pixar batting for the second time that year with Lightyear. Both movies were based on known IPs, though the derivative nature of the latter would fail to connect with audiences, and it would crash and burn on both theatrical and streaming by Pixar standards.
Something that I haven’t seen talked about much in the Rise of Gru success story is that its streaming performance wasn’t particularly standout (UK readers would call it “a bit pants”). The $$$ earned at box office didn’t directly translate to the same performance on streaming. Listen, no one’s disputing that the movie thoroughly trounced the Summer box office. It was part of a chorus that announced cinema was back, alongside Top Gun: Maverick, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Jurassic World Dominion. But streaming performance was very much in line with Lightyear. The Minions, of course, would just stick their tongues out with nearly a billion dollars in global box office, as Lightyear approached only a quarter of that.
Disney’s woes of 2022 wouldn’t end there though. If Lightyear crashed, then Strange World, from Walt Disney Animation Studios, burned a fiery death. A massive miss, and one which would send narratives flying that Disney’s creative juices were enormously out of whack.
That leads us to this year, and a very interesting point in the gauntlet run (full disclosure, there’s never a time when I don’t think that). If Minions: The Rise of Gru had announced that cinema-going for family movies was back in 2022, then The Super Mario Bros. Movie would take things to a whole new level in 2023. The film would net out at $1.3 billion, second highest box office of the year so far, after the juggernaut that is Barbie.
That bad smell of rotten creative juices would follow Disney in 2023. Accusations would be levelled that they had devalued their premium animated movies, particularly those from Pixar, by normalizing audiences to expect them on streaming. A slightly slow start for Elemental at cinemas would have critics piling on before the data had a chance to manifest (tut, tut). Elemental would actually net out on global box office in line with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish—a noteworthy achievement given that one is a new, standalone property, and the other is from a longstanding movie franchise that has consistently driven more than half a billion dollars in box office per go. DreamWorks’ most recent standalone title, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, would go on to show that it’s not just Disney who can have an off day.
Elemental recently landed on Disney+, with aplomb too. Its performance prompted the third ever release on Disney+ global viewership data (welcome to the game, Disney+!).
"the most watched movie premiere of the year... earning 26.4 million views in its first five days of streaming"
This beats the other nuggets we’ve had so far, those being The Little Mermaid (16 million views) and Ahsoka episode 1 (14 million views). We’ll be able to compare more on an apples-to-apples basis when the US Nielsen Streaming Content Ratings numbers drop in a few weeks.
Alongside this, The Super Mario Bros. Movie has landed some excellent numbers on Universal’s own platform, Peacock. Peacock typically takes a short window of DreamWorks and Illumination films before they hit Netflix, as expertly outlined in this chart from Kasey Moore at What’s on Netflix.
Peacock has far lower penetration, and because of this doesn’t feature heavily in performance rankings. Mario is leading the way though, the top movie to premiere on the platform since we’ve had ratings. This hopefully sets the scene for the film to drive some stellar engagement once it hits Netflix in the US, probably ahead of Christmas, a key viewing period generally. The hope would be that it will be up with Sing 2, rather than down with Rise of Gru.
One more thing to add onto the whole conversation is that viewership for Netflix Original animated features, which continue to have streaming-only windows, sits very much on the bottom end of any films that have theatrical releases. The Sea Beast, headlined as their “biggest animated Original film to date,” only just about keeps up. Performance from others this year, The Magician’s Elephant and The Monkey King, is way below again. Putting injury on that, these Pay 1 windows in limited markets (including the US) for DreamWorks/Illumination theatrical movies are enough to move the needle for Netflix on a global level, in their own Top 10 ranking.
So the situation with animation is that high quality movies can very much have their cake and eat it. Box office is the cake, streaming is the icing. It is precisely that additive a relationship. The question from there is whether Netflix, and Apple (with their Skydance Animation output deal), will opt to get in on the action. Because although icing is tasty to stick your finger in, it gets a bit sickly if it’s all you eat. Plus, cake/box office is where the real money is at anyway.