20 Recent Movies Ruined For INSANE Reasons

Pixar's Elio released to broadly positive reviews from critics though flopped at the box office, the consensus being that it was a passably entertaining animated romp but an undeniably lower-tier offering from the beloved studio.

Elio was initially conceived as a more personal project from filmmaker Adrian Molina, inspired by his own experiences growing up in isolation on a military base, but following polarising test screenings in late 2023, Molina was dismissed as director and replaced with Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi.

In the 18 months that followed, Elio underwent significant changes at the behest of Disney executives in an attempt to make it a more "accessible" film.

For one, the queer-coded elements of the central character were largely eliminated, while the cynical perspective of Molina's original story, which featured a more contentious relationship between humans and aliens, was replaced with a broader, conflict-averse one.

The result was a film which anonymous Pixar employees believed was "sanded down" into a more generic animated film, prompting the howlingly tone-deaf response from Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter that, "We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy."

Ultimately this speaks to a wider cultural shift at both Disney and Pixar, but first and foremost - why greenlight a director's deeply personal passion project if you're not going to follow it through to completion?