Elio has risen up the chart of Pixar’s 2020s output for the first time since its debut. The 2025 animated movie follows Elio (Yonas Kibreab), an 11-year-old who is obsessed with aliens and finds himself mistaken for Earth’s ambᴀssador by an extraterrestrial organization called the Communiverse.

Although the movie earned a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 82%, the Elio release started off with a whimper, with a 3-day opening weekend gross of $20.8 million marking the worst domestic debut ever for Pixar. Their previous low was their first-ever release, 1995’s Toy Story ($29.1 million).

Per Variety, as of Sunday morning, Elio is projected to take in a 3-day total of $4 million at the domestic box office by the end of its fourth weekend in theaters, with a narrow week-on-week drop of roughly 32%. This will push its cumulative domestic total to $63 million.

In addition to making Elio the 16th release of 2025 to pᴀss the $60 million domestic milestone, this total sees it surpᴀssing the $61.5 million domestic gross of 2020’s Onward, meaning that it is no longer Pixar’s lowest-grossing domestic release of the decade.

This ranking does not include 2020’s Soul nor 2021’s Luca and Turning Red, which debuted on Disney+ in the United States amid the COVID-19 pandemic, though they all eventually received brief domestic re-releases.

What This Means For Elio

Beating Onward Should Have Been Easier

Although Elio has beaten Onward, that movie was also hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic. It debuted in domestic theaters on March 6, 2020, shortly before theaters across North America were shut down. In fact, amid the beginning of the pandemic, it became available on premium video on demand on March 20 as its theatrical run was cut significantly short.

Below, see a breakdown of the box office performance of all the Pixar movies from the 2020s that received a proper domestic theatrical release, to see how Onward compares:

In order to rise any higher up the chart of Pixar’s 2020s movies, Elio would have to make an additional $55.3 million in domestic theaters in order to surpᴀss 2022’s Lightyear. Considering the fact that that total is nearly as much as it made in its first four weeks, the prospect of it doing so seems entirely unlikely.

Our Take On The Elio Box Office

Its Future Still Looks Grim

In spite of this milestone, the Elio box office still seems set to bomb. The reported budget of the movie is a whopping $150 million, which is a total that the movie seems unlikely to reach worldwide. Even then, earning back its budget wouldn’t necessarily make it profitable, as its estimated break-even point could be as high as $375 million.

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Source: Variety