Todd Duboff
Comm 240 | October 9, 2013
Predicting Pixar Success
One of the biggest success stories over the past decade and a half of movies—if not one of the
greatest success stories of any movie studio in film history—has been the incredible financial and
critical success of Pixar Animation Studios’ films, distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Since the
release of Toy Story in 1995 to stunning praise and box office success, all of Pixar’s thirteen
subsequent films have been box office hits, with nearly all of them receiving rapturous praise and
acclaim from critics and viewers alike. Though Toy Story, being the first computer-animated feature
film ever released, made film history and ignited the future of Pixar, it also spurred the creation of a
whole new subset of films, computer-animated features. In the few years after Toy Story’s release,
other film studios—notably Dreamworks Animation—began to release their own computeranimated films to compete with Pixar and grab the attention of that ever-reliable audience
demographic, families with children. By 2001, with the release of Dreamworks’ megahit Shrek (and
its win over Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. for the first Best Animated Feature Oscar), Pixar’s unchallenged
reign as the sole leader in computer-animated films was over. Over the next decade, audiences
experienced an avalanche of animated films, particularly computer-animated ones, as their
generally reliable success and the versatility of the medium proved a strong lure for studio
executives. Through it all, Pixar released a steady stream of hits, with one film released each year
starting in 2006. And yet, as I discovered, the increase in other studios’ computer-animated films
has put a noticeable dent in Pixar’s early box office supremacy.
Entertainment magazines and newspaper articles constantly shower Pixar with praise and laud
Walt Disney, Pixar’s owner, for its relatively shrewd handling of the studio over the last decade. I
was interested, however, in whether the glut of animated films in more recent years has done any
damage to Pixar’s success (financially, that is—Pixar’s knack for quality films will hopefully
remain strong for years to come). I therefore chose as my independent variable the number of
computer-animated movies released in the U.S. in the six months prior to a Pixar film release, and
my dependent variable as the domestic box office success of the Pixar film (I used domestic box
office, not worldwide, since I only focused on U.S.-released films). Only computer-animated films
were chosen to better parallel the unique film offering Pixar presents as opposed to traditional 2Danimated movies, which have largely disappeared from theaters. The six month time frame was
chosen as a reasonable span relating to the audience: parents with young children. If there has been
a long stretch without any similar film released, I thought it might be more likely that a family will
choose to see a Pixar film (or any animated movie) to satiate their children. Whereas on the other
hand, too much competition from other computer-animated movies might make the Pixar movie
less of a “must-see” if it’s released in the months after multiple seemingly similar movies. There are
only so many movies a family will choose to see each year, and in the wake of numerous other
computer-animated films released in the months leading up to it, a Pixar movie could be likely to
suffer at the box office from too much competition.
For my data, I chose to focus only on Pixar’s 10 movies from the last 10 years until today—
2003’s Finding Nemo to 2013’s Monsters University. The time frame was chosen as it represented
the first Pixar movie released after the Shrek/Monsters Inc. matchup in 2001, which started the
increase in these animated movies. My findings, it turned out, corroborated my hypothesis: there
was a clear correlation (though not necessarily a causal link) between more movies released prior to
a Pixar one and the Pixar one’s box office.
Finding Nemo faced zero other computer-animated movies in the six months leading up to it,
and earned more than all but one subsequent Pixar films.
# of
CGIAnimated
Films in
Previous
6 months
Whereas 2011’s Cars 2 faced six different computeranimated movies leading up to it and suffered the lowest
domestic box office performance of any Pixar film. The
Domestic
Box Office
($)
Finding Nemo
0
339,714,978
rest of the films fell in a near straight downward-sloping
The Incredibles
3
261,441,092
line, indicating the negative correlation I expected
Cars
4
244,082,982
between heavy competition and box office success. The
Ratatouille
5
206,445,654
Wall-E
4
223,808,164
Up
3
293,004,164
Toy Story 3
3
415,004,880
film was a highly-anticipated sequel 10 years in the
Cars 2
6
191,452,396
making, and part of one of the most beloved and visible
Brave
2
237,283,207
Monsters U.
3
266,530,366
one outlier was 2010’s Toy Story 3, though that was an
unusual case—unlike most original Pixar offerings, that
franchises in the world.
Though this analyzes only one aspect behind the success (or lack thereof) of Pixar films, it
does raise an important takeaway: the market for computer-animated movies is not limitless, and
increased competition can hurt even the most highly regarded and well-known player in the field.
Pixar still receives extraordinary reviews and has become a brand unto itself, but it is not immune
from the competitive forces of other studios jumping the gun and releasing films beforehand. While
there are plenty of other factors that affect its films’ success, like the plotline, marketing and crossmedia promotion, celebrity voices and critics’ reviews, Pixar should carefully scour the market
before choosing release dates and be extremely cognizant of the effect its competitors can have on
its product.
Sources: Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes pages for each individual Pixar film; Wikipedia
(“List of Computer-Animated Films”)