Pixar film bombs badly, and staffers blame execs for erasing woke themes after disastrous audience test

A damning report says that Pixar executives drastically changed the lead character in their newest animated film offering because audiences said in pre-release testing that they would not go watch the film.

“Elio” tells the tale of an 11-year-old boy who is taken into space and accidentally becomes Earth’s ambassador to an interstellar organization of alien communities. The film was not well received and has bombed at the box office.

‘The exodus of talent after that cut was really indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work.’

In the wake of the film’s failure, staffers are coming out to accuse Pixar executives of messing with the film’s main character to strip him of features meant to portray him as gay, according to a report from the Hollywood Reporter.

The report says that the movie was shown to a test audience in Arizona, and while many said they enjoyed the movie, not one person said they’d see it in the theater, which alarmed studio executives.

Adrian Molina, the film’s original director, is an openly gay man. After a meeting with executives, Molina left the production, and the project was undertaken by co-directors.

Under Molina’s direction, the main character had been written as being a fan of fashion and environmentalism, and there was a scene that implied he had a crush on another male, but execs decided to cut all of that out.

After the film’s devastating box office failures, staffers are coming out to blame executives for cutting out the woke elements of the movie.

“I was deeply saddened and aggrieved by the changes that were made,” said Sarah Ligatich, a former assistant editor at Pixar and a member of PixPRIDE, an internal LGBTQ group at the studio.

“The exodus of talent after that cut was really indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work,” she added.

Ligatich says that many of the creatives on the film left the project after the decision made by executives, but the studio denied the claim to THR.

RELATED: Disney’s woke ‘Snow White’ is one of its worst box office bombs

Another former Pixar artist commented on the report.

“It was pretty clear through the production of the first version of the film that [studio leaders] were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio’s sexuality of being queer,” said the source anonymously.

Others said the character was more interesting in the original version but was far more generic after executives meddled with the film.

“Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing,” said the former Pixar artist.

Another stumbling block in the film was the sudden departure of actress America Ferrera, who was going to portray the voice of the main character’s mother. Pixar says scheduling conflicts led to Ferrera being replaced on the film, but the THR report had another explanation having to do with the director’s exit.

“America was upset that there was no longer Latinx representation in the leadership,” said the former Pixar artist.

The movie was believed to have cost Pixar $150 million to produce, but staffers told THR that they believed it cost far more than that. In its opening weekend, the film garnered slightly less than $21 million, a complete disaster.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!