Pixar's latest offering, Onward, was on its way to being a commercial disappointment, but now it's a streaming favorite thanks to Disney+. Hollywood has responded in various ways to the continuing coronavirus pandemic. Major productions have shut down indefinitely, big-budget tentpole titles have been delayed or pulled from their release schedule, and the prospect of straight-to-VOD releases has become ever-more tempting. It’s likely that billions of dollars will have been lost by the time this is all over – a prospect that feels ever so far away right now – and studios are doing all that they can to stop the bleeding.
The Walt Disney Company has made some massive changes to stave off the worst of the damage. Disney rearranged their release slate for the coming two years to accommodate major date changes such as Mulan and Black Widow. Some titles will now be released straight to their relatively new streaming service Disney+, such as Artemis Fowl. To keep audiences entertained in the interim period, Disney+ has seen some highly anticipated titles make their streaming debut far earlier than anticipated. Frozen 2 made the jump months ahead of their schedule, and joining it soon thereafter was Onward. Directed by Dan Scanlon (Monsters University), Onward stars Chris Pratt and Tom Holland as two elf brothers living in a suburban fantasy world who set out on a quest to bring their deceased father back to life.
Onward was released in theaters on March 6, however, the true scope of the coronavirus pandemic became clear almost immediately after. The decision was made to release Onward digitally just over two weeks later. On April 3, Onward became available for Disney+ subscribers. While Onward didn't get a full run at the box office - especially damaging given its estimated $200 million budget, just half of which it made back - putting it on VOD and then Disney+ helps offset this somewhat: what Disney lost at the box office they can start to recoup in new subscribers, offering families at home another major new film to watch. That's preferable to having the movie just sitting with no one able to watch it, and means it can still be a big new release for the Mouse House, helping to promote their streaming service. That's good for Disney+, and it's great for Onward too.
Onward Was A Box Office Struggle Before The Shutdown
On its opening weekend, Onward made $39.1 million domestically, which are reasonably solid numbers for a March release with no real competition. It is, however, a downturn in terms of Pixar releases. Pixar and Disney Animation don't do cheap productions, especially when compared to their competition at Dreamworks and Illumination. Onward's budget was reportedly $175 - 200 million, which is standard stuff for Pixar but gargantuan in the American animation world. By contrast, Minions, the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film of all time, cost only $74 million.
It's admirable that Disney and Pixar see animation as being worth the investment rather than an endless series of cost-cutting measures or a secondary art-form. At the same time, it does, of course, make those profits ever-harder to achieve. Going by the standard break-even rule of a gross two and a half times that of the budget, Onward would have needed to make around $500 million worldwide to achieve that. With that in mind, an opening weekend of less than $40 million, and a take of $100 million overall, seems pretty disappointing and near-disastrous for Disney and Pixar.
It didn't help that the film saw an eye-watering drop in gross of 72.9% the following weekend. Audiences stayed away from theaters in droves thanks to the coronavirus, while the reviews for Onward were positive but not critically acclaimed in the way Pixar's biggest hitters have been. By and large, the film was met with a shrug. Once the big theater chains started closing, Pixar really had no choice but to either get Onward in front of at-home audiences in any way possible or leave it to languish as a casualty of this terrifying pandemic. In that context, Disney+ cannot help but seem like a minor cinematic savior.
How Successful Was Onward's VOD Release?
It's hard to gauge the success of any movie or TV series on streaming because those services are notoriously hesitant to release any hard or verifiable data. Netflix, for example, will proudly tout certain properties as having been watched by tens of millions of people but there's no way for a secondary source to prove that and questions remain over the authenticity of those numbers (how long did these people watch it for, how many minutes of viewing counts as a full watch, etc). Onward did place 2nd in the iTunes purchases after its release, and 6th on Amazon (h/t IndieWire), but that's not wholly representative of success since those charts don't give a full picture of consumers.
Disney+ offers no numbers at all and probably won’t do so for the time being, if at all. What we do have are Google trend numbers which at least give us a solid view into public interest of a film or product. When Onward became available for VOD, interest (via Google Trends) did not increase for the movie. Indeed, it actually dipped a little. However, Onward became more popular after hitting Disney+, as those numbers vastly increased, with a big spike in searches for the movie, even above its release in cinemas. This isn’t indicative of how many people actually watched the movie on the platform, but at least shows that making the film more readily available did give Disney and Pixar a much-needed boost for Onward.
Onward Is Perfect Disney+ Content
Onward has garnered a curious reputation as a critical flop in a short period of time. Contrary to that now-accepted logic, the movie was actually pretty warmly received. Indeed, Onward possesses an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (as well as being certified fresh) plus a Metacritic ranking of 61 on Metacritic. Granted, that places it in the lower half of Pixar's output in terms of reviews, but that's only because the company has set the bar so high for themselves. Still, Onward is the sort of fun family movie that plays well to its target audience. The more people watch it, the more they seem to like it, even if they didn’t see it in theaters.
Even in the current age of Peak Streaming Services, with film-makers like Alfonso Cuaron and Martin Scorsese making the leap to said platforms, it’s hard to get over the instinctive reaction to streaming-exclusive movies as somehow being ‘lesser’ to theatrical releases. It’s nonsense, of course, and Onward is certainly far better than that. However, in terms of pure access and what at-home audiences are willing to watch, there is greater leeway with the quality of streaming movies than ones where a family of four may have to pay upwards of $50 to see it. Disney+ has strong subscriber numbers and currently possess a captive audience, so giving them access to a shiny new Pixar movie feels special and gives it a more secure viewership at a time when the film and the company both need it. If a film is there and it requires little to no effort to get access to and watch it, people will do so. Perhaps that’s exactly what Onward, this “inessential” Pixar movie, needed: The right audience at the right time.