Around that time, Pixar’s leadership showed an in-progress film called “Be Fri,” short for “best friends,” to Iger and other Disney executives. Soon after, Docter canceled the project, which was based on its director’s adolescent experience with a platonic breakup. Employees were stunned when a project three years in the works with roughly 50 people involved was scrapped. “It’s super hard to make sure we’re not just settling for a film getting better, but ensuring it’s great,” said Lindsey Collins, Pixar’s senior vice president of development.
Ben Fritz wrote:One of the girls would have connected to some fantastical characters. One source described to me as "like superheroes" and another as "Sailor Moon-esque."
A different former Pixar staffer tells THR that some employees are disappointed that the studio seems to let concerns about public perception lead its decision-making on movies like Elio and Be Fri. According to the individual, “the joke around Pixar” is that leadership “has no spine at all.” A representative for the studio declined to comment for this story.
This is about the sum of it.
Docter's battle plan to prove to everyone that he's not a pushover is to kowtow to everyone who's bigger than him. We can perhaps guess how that'll go.
I don't blame Docter any more than I blamed Lee at WDAS. Neither of them really have much power, they're beholden to people above them. And you can see a throughline between all of the films post-Raya/Lightyear at both studios of stories being oversimplified to the point they went too far in the opposite direction to know these were orders that came from the top to both studios, not something that came from either Lee or Docter. Being the head means being the bad guy and having to tell people their projects are scrapped.
While something Sailor Moon-esque does definitely sound interesting and, as I said above, KPOP Demon Hunters shows that had potential, I'm not sure if I really could've seen PIXAR pulling something like that off. Sailor Moon was more of a female-driven fairy tale type of story, which is more in line with WDAS. That and the look of Wish--which is sort of a Paperman in training wheels visual style--is closer to looking like KPOP Demon Hunters than anything PIXAR's done so far. (Not to mention WDAS being the studio that makes musicals, which KPOP Demon Hunters also was.) Even the title here is a little cringeworthy. So I don't really blame them for cutting it. What I don't get is how Elio didn't get scrapped after Strange World and Lightyear predictably flopped in the vein of Atlantis and Treasure Planet; they had already got the picture at that point that sci-fi animated films are a miss. All I can assume is it was already so far along, but they could've confined it to streaming rather than get another flop box office headline to deal with. Even Hoppers being scrapped wouldn't have surprised me.
TBH, they should've intended streaming-only for Snow White, too, after TLM flopped since it was a Walt-era property that would've had less potential at the box office anyway and they'd got the writing on the wall with where the racebends, genderbends, song cuts and story changes lead. Only reason I can guess there is because they way way overspent budget-wise, they hoped to make back anything they could, however little. Funny though, I believe it was in part *after* TLM did almost half what it should have that they went back in on Snow White to attempt to make the film appear more faithful (we know they re-filmed several Zegler scenes to make the hair look more like the original character), but the die was cast at that point with the casting and early talk of cut Dwarfs, why deliberately spend more money on something that was guaranteed to flop at that point? I guess to stem the criticism and negativity from bleeding over into audience skepticism of future remakes? Who knows.
Listening to most often lately:
Christina Aguilera ~ "Cruz"
Sombr ~ "homewrecker"
Megan Moroney ~ "Beautiful Things"
I think he and Lee were saddled with many of the same roadblocks, and those have done more to impede the success of their films than the actual quality of their leadership, which I think that journalists continue to deliberately overlook in the interest of a tastier news piece. (Mostly. I am still unresolved over precisely how much I blame Lee for "Wish.") And I can believe that a lot of the things that happened during their tenures were handed down from Chapek or Iger--like the way that Disney+ has crippled their box office returns. There may be a scenario where Docter is just the messenger boy here. But I don't think that can cover every bad decision that happened around the studios during this time.
Much of the reason why I harp on Docter, where I was much more agreeable with Lee, is because of how I've seen his public performance shift, particularly over the last year or so. The kill shot for me was the stuff that came to light in the Wall Street Journal article about a month back where, after fending off chatterings that Pixar's movies had become "too personal" for so long, we see Docter conceding to the idea that "You know what? That sounds like valid criticism to me."
This is made worse because this is also probably the least grounded observation a person has ever made about art. Like, never before has "this is just too personal" been a useful means of discerning the merit of a film. Definitely not in the high art realm that Pixar aspires to assimilate into, and not really even in "popular art." The only reason why that was a talking point among The New York Times because it was a popular talking point among the marketing for movies that faced much more specific roadblocks. This dialogue is coming from people who never really considered the ecosystem in which these kinds of movies are developed, no doubt because they don't see animation as demanding that much sophistication. So Docter trying to entertain this crowd just shows that the guy can't plant his feet, or else he can't recognize when a criticism is useless. Or maybe both. I was firmly in the Lee camp during her entire reign, and I have historically really liked Docter, but him waffling does a lot to deflate my estimation of him.
The whole scenario is giving me PTSD over the way Disney Animation all across the 21st century has calibrated much of its performance based on the feedback from their worst critics. Like, this feels uncomfortably close to the thought processes that conditioned Disney to stay away from something like more classical depictions of romance in their films hoping it would make the cool kids invite them to their table. (Spoiler alert: it didn't.) And so for Docter to just give up the one card they had that gave Pixar the edge over Disney Animation, it'll put him right under my spotlight if Pixar really does crumble here in the next few years, which is absolutely not where I thought he'd be when they first announced he was being put in the driver's seat.
