After its latest film “Elio” flopped at the box office on its opening weekend, Pixar is once again at the center of controversy.
Anonymous sources told The Hollywood Reporter that Pixar CEO Pete Docter opted to have “Elio” be stripped of its gay coded themes, much as was the case for “Lightyear,” “Luca,” and most recently, “Inside Out 2.” This in part led to both the exits of original director Adrian Molina and later, actress America Ferrera.
“A lot of people like to blame Disney, but the call is coming from inside the house,” a former Pixar artist told THR. “A lot of it is obeying-in-advance behavior, coming from the higher execs at Pixar. […] 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.”
IndieWire has reached out to Pixar parent company Disney for comment.
“Elio” premiered in theaters June 22 and flopped at the box office with a meager $20.8 million domestic opening, making history as the lowest ever in Pixar’s history. The film had a rumored production budget north of $150 million.
Per THR sources, the lead character Elio was initially portrayed as a queer-coded character, as openly gay filmmaker Molina (“Coco”) wanted. While it is believed that Molina “did not intend the film to be a coming out story, as the character is 11,” as THR reported, the film included storylines about Elio having a love of fashion and bedroom posters of a possible male crush.
According to the report, Molina screened a cut of the film to Pixar executives in 2023. The film also had an early test screening in Arizona for an audience that did not go well, with no one raising their hands to indicate they would pay to go to the film in a theater. Pixar then called in Molina to speak about changing the film; the director exited the project soon after a discussion with Docter that allegedly left Molina “hurt.”
“Elio” was instead reworked by storyboard artist Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi (“Turning Red”), who became the film’s co-directors after Molina left. Molina was offered to co-direct “Elio” with Sharafian, but after notes and changes to the film, he decided to leave entirely. In 2025, Molina was announced as the co-director for “Coco 2.”
Oscar nominee America Ferrera, who was set to play Elio’s mom, also parted ways with the film after having already recorded dialogue; a source to THR claimed Ferrera exited after Molina’s departure as she was “upset that there was no longer Latinx representation in the leadership.” Oscar winner Zoe Saldaña later took on the part, which became Elio’s aunt in the new script, which was a mess within itself.
“Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and ‘Elio’ just becomes about totally nothing,” the former Pixar artist added. “The ‘Elio ‘that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian’s best version of the original.”
Another former Pixar staffer that worked on the film added, “[The character] Elio was just so cute and so much fun and had so much personality, and now he feels much more generic to me.”
The structure of Pixar’s meddling in certain storylines also extends to upcoming animated “Hoppers.” THR reported that creatives on the feature were told by Pixar executives to cut a divorce plotline, “which is so wild,” and also de-emphasize the environmental activism.
Meanwhile, “Elio” is still floundering in theaters. The IndieWire review pointed to the disjointed production, reading, “If there were ever a version of ‘Elio’ that had the spark of an old Pixar classic, it got shuffled out of existence by a turbulent production process that saw original director Adrian Molina, who previously helmed the company’s Oscar-winner ‘Coco,’ replaced by the duo of Domee Shi — whose hilarious ‘Turning Red’ remains the best Pixar film of the 2020s by a significant margin — and Madeline Sharafian, known for directing the short ‘Burrow.’ Molina based the film’s original story concept heavily on his own life, and the directorial transition occurred right around Pixar head Pete Docter admitting the studio would be pivoting away from ‘personal stories’ driven by directors to films with universal mass appeal. Certain elements of the script directly based on Molina’s life, such as Elio’s mother working for the military, got rewritten entirely.”