Pixar's Elemental Sets Premiere for Cannes Film Festival
Disney and Pixar have announced today that Elemental, their upcoming animated film starring Mamoudou Athie (Jurassic World Dominion) and Leah Lewis (Nancy Drew), will debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May before it goes to theaters worldwide in June. Elemental will be the fourth feature film from Pixar Animation Studios to be presented in Cannes, following on the heels of Up, Inside Out and Soul (which was an official selection for the 2020 festival, although it was cancelled due to COVID). The movie has a lot of positive buzz, and will be premiering (out of competition) on May 27 at the globally-renowned film festival.
Directed by Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur, Partly Cloudy short) and produced by Denise Ream (The Good Dinosaur, Cars 2), the film journeys alongside an unlikely pair, Ember and Wade, in a city where fire-, water-, land- and air-residents live together. The fiery young woman and the go-with-the-flow guy are about to discover something elemental: how much they actually have in common.
"My parents emigrated from Korea in the early 1970s and built a bustling grocery store in the Bronx," Sohn said back in May. "We were among many families who ventured to a new land with hopes and dreams -- all of us mixing into one big salad bowl of cultures, languages, and beautiful little neighborhoods. That's what led me to Elemental."
Strange World and Elemental are the first original properties to head to theaters from Pixar since the start of the pandemic, with movies like Onward and Turning Red debuting on Disney+ while Lightyear went to theaters. The latter underperformed somewhat, which might make Disney a little nervous when it comes to rolling out a pair of brand-new ideas in the near future. The last Pixar film to do huge numbers was Toy Story 4, which hit before the start of the pandemic. The last original story to make it huge was Coco, which made over $800 million in 2017.
Still, in spite of some recent disappointments, a Pixar movie is one of the closest things Disney has to a sure thing at the box office -- and even more so with critics. The Disney+-released Soul and Turning Red both earned rave reviews and have been consistent performers on the streaming site. After Elemental, Pixar has another sequel coming in the form of Inside Out 2, which is scheduled for a 2024 release date.
Elemental is set to debut on June 16, 2023.
