The first flop in the entire canon of Pixar movies was The Good Dinosaur, which had a torturous production history and a budget that swelled. Now, due to force majeure, Onward is the second Pixar flop – but due entirely to the coronavirus pandemic.
While reviews have slighted Onward as a second-rate Pixar product and the picture would have likely seen box office receipts lower than their usual output – there was no reason to believe that if the marketplace was not affected by a pandemic, that Onward would have pulled in profitable grosses.
The Disney marketing machine supported the movie with its full muscle and launched a global marketing blitz, which usually costs the mouse house about $150 million. Before the coronavirus wreaked havoc, iSpotTV had listed Disney’s TV ad spend at $26 million, two weeks before the March 6 opening.
At least $40 million worth of TV spots would have been spent going into release and domestic P&A costs would be north of $60 million. No budget figures were released by Disney, but the film was expected to cost about $200 million.
Marketing and the Coronavirus Release
Along with the traditional P&A push, the mouse house also partnered with Hasbro, Mattel, and Funko for merchandise, clothes, and backpacks were at Old Navy, there was a tie-in with McDonald’s and dozens of other corporations that gave exposure to Onward.
It bowed against The Way Back, landed lukewarm reviews, and opened below estimates at $39,119,861 – placing #1 for the weekend. Many analysts pegged the soft numbers on the product, not the impact of the virus, which was simply ridiculous.
With a portion of our society panic shopping and hoarding mountains of toilet paper, this was not a normal movie-going climate.
As the second weekend was approaching, movie theaters were closing across the US and there was a huge 72.9% decline in attendance to $10,601,952 – where it won the very slow weekend. Just a few days later the box office stopped being reported and the stateside numbers were $61,555,145.
Disney made the film available for rent/purchase digitally on March 20.
International numbers are at $41.6 million, bringing the global gross to $103.1. This would return about $56 million after theaters take their percentage of the gross.
Disney and Pixar’s Onward is probably my most recent favorite film to have been considered a commercial flop (though that can be blamed entirely on the corona-virus pandemic outbreak), as well as being the last film I saw in theaters before they closed down.
It’s a really great animated adventure film that really deserved a better box office performance had it been released during a different time before the outbreak, and I’m glad that Disney has made the film available to purchase/download on March 20th as well as being available to stream on their streaming subscription service Disney+ on April 3rd for free so that people can still see the film at their home.