K-Pop Demon Hunters… and what Disney movie?

Have you been to see Disney’s new science-fiction animation? Neither has the rest of the world.

Unsurprisingly, Disney-Pixar’s newest film, Elio, has fallen short of the company’s expectations. On the contrary, Sony Pictures’ K-Pop Demon Hunters has remained number one on Netflix’s Top 10 for the past 60 days.

So, with the release of yet another abysmal film out of Disney Animation Studios, does this signal the cursed future of theatrical releases?

Not necessarily.

The difference between the public’s reactions comes down to the storyline and writing. Even with the $100 million marketing budget, Elio pulled in just $144 million globally, considerably below its estimated breakeven of over $500 million.

Considering marketing differences, how was K-Pop Demon Hunters able to surpass the undisputed king of animation? Simple answer, people are bored of the overly simplified, hyper-saturated stories from Disney-Pixar’s studio. Even after cutting back the story’s themes of queer identity and emotional authenticity to appeal to a wider audience, the film still came across as kid-centric and too thematically safe.

This differs from Disney-Pixar’s older work, and is the same reason K-Pop Demon Hunters captured such a broad age of audiences. Making “kids movies for adults”. Think Toy Story and more recently, Zootopia, where themes of adapting to change and prejudice were communicated to parents, while themes of growing up and individuality were communicated to their children. It doesn’t help that the official Pixar Instagram called out fans as if they were an indie movie studio and not one of the biggest companies in the world.   

“Stop complaining that Disney doesn’t make original stories if you don’t show up to movie theatres and support them in the first place.”

– Pixar Official Instagram

With negative reactions to Disney’s recent focus on telling overly personal stories of childhood trauma, and running after cash-grabs like sequels and live-action remakes, Elio’s inevitable failure should have been clear. The difference with K-Pop Demon Hunters was their original story and new character designs, following the fictional k-pop group turn demon hunters fighting the underworld with their song. Rather than falling on the increasingly popular ‘bean mouth’ animation style, Sony, both with this film as well as their highly-acclaimed Spider-Verse movies, has broken the mould in a way viewers loved.

However, this doesn’t need to signal the end of theatrical releases for children’s movies. What needs to change is Disney’s approach to telling new stories, rather than the same, poorly-written, coming-of-age animations they’ve been producing for the past five years. Maybe then, they can go back to creating beloved generational classics, and no, I’m not talking about remakes.