Is Pixar starting to lose quality and become worse?

[Zauriel]

In doing some quick research in 2004, Pixar decided not to renew their original contract with Disney and their last movie was scheduled to be Cars. But they changed their mind because Disney was going to keep the rights to the movies that Pixar already made in order to make the sequels themselves.

Under the "new" agreement, Pixar became a fully-owned subsidiary of Disney. Disney Animation studios was merged with Pixar while Pixar management was given near total control in the merge.

Which might explain why Disney Animation has taken a step forward while Pixar has taken a step back.

Basically, the creatives at Pixar would all need to leave and make a new studio in order to be free unless Disney decided to spin it off into a separate studio.

Which harkens back to my implied point that I think being part of Disney has dulled the creative output a bit since they don't need to fight for space in the animation world.

Sometimes competition drives success.

I see. Thanks for the information.

Disney has its own animation studio and has started using computer animation as Pixar after the box office success of Tangled. Disney stopped using hand-drawn animation since the Princess and the Frog. So both studios are currently using computer animation, sometimes it is easy to confuse Pixar with Disney.

[Zauriel]

Pixar has produced 27 feature films, starting with Toy Story (1995), which is the first fully computer-animated feature film; its most recent film was Elemental (2023).

Pixar's last successful film before the pandemic until now was Toy Story 4 that came out in 2019. But it was a sequel from a popular billion-dollar franchise. Onward, Soul, Luca, Lightyear and Turning Red have all bombed.

Elio was supposed to be released this year but was moved to a later date as 2025. Now we are going to get Inside Out 2 instead. I hope it will sell better than Elemental, which got lucky enough to have legs.

[Kirby101]

Elemental should be considered a hit. Not a smash like other Pixar movies, but still successful. It's earnings were close to the recent Spiderverse movie. Most of the others you mentioned were hurt by the pandemic. So I am not counting Pixar out.

[BeastieRunner]

Elemental should be considered a hit. Not a smash like other Pixar movies, but still successful. It's earnings were close to the recent Spiderverse movie. Most of the others you mentioned were hurt by the pandemic. So I am not counting Pixar out.

In the old days, Elemental would be called a sleeper hit.

These days, if you don't make your budget back on opening weekend, you're a flop even if you make money the rest of your run.