Turning Red, Pixar’s latest, is skipping theaters for Disney Plus
Domee Shi's adolescent/panda comedy is the third Pixar movie in a row to go streaming-only
Aux News Turning Red
Pixar has announced that its latest film, Domee Shi’s coming-of-age comedy Turning Red, will be skipping the theaters, and will instead debut this March on Disney+.
It’s been nearly three years now since Onward—the last Pixar film to get anything resembling a wide theatrical release—became one of the first cinematic victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite drawing generally strong reviews for its story of family and grief in a magical world, Dan Scanlon’s film brought in a meager $141.9 million at the box office, making it significantly less successful than Pixar’s previous biggest flop, The Good Dinosaur—which at least managed to make its budget back in 2015.
That probably helps explain why Disney and Pixar have been so comfortable turning the last two Pixar projects (Soul and Luca) over to the relative safety of Disney+, where they can bolster the streaming service’s profile without having to worry about breaking even at a tumultuous box office.
Now Turning Red will join them in aforementioned streaming safety. The film stars Rosalie Chiang as a 13-year-old girl dealing with peer pressure, teenager drama, and a loving but over-bearing mother (played by Sandra Oh). Also: Any time she gets too excited, she turns into a giant red panda bear, as one does.
The film is Shi’s first feature. She’s been with Pixar since 2015's Inside Out, before gaining more widespread recognition (and an Oscar!) for her 2018 short film Bao, which played in front of The Incredibles 2—and which also, probably not coincidentally, dealt with themes of independence and parental protectiveness.
Turning Red will arrive on Disney+ on March 11. Disney hasn’t explicitly said whether the film will get the “paid premium” treatment applied to films like Mulan and Black Widow on the service, but given that both Luca and Soul were released for free to subscribers on their day of release, we’re betting not. The film will run in theaters in countries where Disney+ has yet to roll out.
104 Comments
That’s a bit of a bummer, but I get it. At least they were able to rake in a bunch of money from Spider-Man.Also, Onward came out in 2020, so it’s been nearly two years, not three.
I was going to mention this, but the last time I complained about a “three” in an A.V. Club article, I accidentally shot my own foot off.
One of my very unofficial “how is COVID going?” metrics is “Are studios pulling movies from theatres or delaying theatrical releases.”Hmmmm.
I remember when Bond was one of the first films to push its release way back in early 2020 and that made me realise COVID would definitely be a problem across the whole world for quite a while.
Honestly I knew Omicron was gonna be a big deal when SNL did that clip show last month
That’s weird since I saw a preview for it in the theater a little bit ago… That being said, it looked kinda like Teen Wolf (the movie, not the TV show) and I was wondering if she’d get good at basketball and go van surfing.
Yeah it played before West Side Story for me, one of like ten trailers.
So many trailers. After, say, four, none ever retain in my memory. There was this one, the Peter Dinklage Cyrano story, another Fantastic Beasts…Three. I can only remember three.
I mentioned this above, but I’m honestly puzzled that the advertising so far doesn’t explain the reason the girl transforms. Is it a magical curse, is she some kind of superhero, or what? As it is, the concept seems more suited to a short than a feature if it’s “uh, because emotions!”
And having learned more about the premise, it is Teen Wolf all over again!
So a teenage girl suddenly turning into a red monster is a metaphor for menstruation, right?
Turning Red!Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Wear White Pants To School
It’s a metaphor for an innocent young woman being seduced by those damn commies.Damn you, Mao…
Damn you, hero of Pureheart Valley!
In the midnight hour, she cried “Mao, Mao, Mao.”
Oof.
Friggin’ Bolsheviks
On a semi-related note, don’t give me this red panda bullshit. Have you ever seen one? They’re ginger raccoons!
So, no souls then?
Presumably. (don’t tell my redhead wife)
It’s sad that this pandemic has been 3 Pixar releases long. That being said, Soul and Luca were the best movies Pixar has released since Inside Out and better than any of the Disney-branded animated features in the last decade.
I liked Soul a lot (especially second viewing on a cinema screen – the visuals are astonishing) and I loved Luca but Wreck-It Ralph just squeezes into the last decade of Disney films so I can’t give them that credit. I’d also put Coco over Soul but that’s no knock on Soul.
We watched Luca last weekend. It was surprisingly good! I think Pixar still has it, when it wants to.
Coco is fantastic.
I was surprised how much I loved luca. The simpleness of it, mixed with the fun performances and gorgeous animation really clicked with me.
Luca is the closest thing any western studio has ever came to making a Miyazaki film. It’s somehow magical and fantastical but also simple and just sort low key, in a good way.
They really mined deep for the miyazaki love as well. Alberto’s entire design is a dead ringer for the protagonist of Future Boy Conan.
It’s also the gayest film Pixar has ever made! Luca/Alberto forever.
Clearly the movie is selling us in a throuple
My impression of Luca was that they made a really good movie almost by accident. I really wanted to love Soul, but it just didn’t click.
MOANA is substantially better than anything Pixar has put out in the last decade.
Soul is fucking amazing with incredible soundtrack and well-written story. I haven’t seen Luca yet though I hope that Turning Red would find similar success.
Coco is by far and away better than Soul. The latter felt simultaneously safe and, while not terrible, certainly forgettable.
They’re both solid, but Wreck-It Ralph, Moana, and Coco are better than both of them
This is a good move because theatres in Ontario Canada are closed. “Hey, we’re going to put out a Pixar movie from a Canadian filmmaker about Toronto, Ontario! That none of you can go see!” So yah damn well better put it on D+.
(I’m hoping theatres re-open for The Batman in March, which could be plausible. Or, y’know WB, just move that Secrets of Dumblenobodycares to March and The Bat to April to ensure the widest possible audience..)
Fellow Ontario-person here! That has honestly been my biggest curiousity of the new Ontario lockdown, how will this affect The Batman. Will it just happen and we just don’t get to see it now that WB isn’t doing the simultaneous streaming thing anymore. Or will that come back. As a long time Batman fan it bothers me to consider the possibility that this film will just release despite Toronto and I don’t like that.
WB Canada is putting Matrix Resurrections on VOD for Canada on Friday. I was totally all in on WB Canada putting the HBOMax movies on VOD but they stopped at The Suicide Squad (so I saw Matrix 4 in theatre opening night). I honestly get the feeling theatres will be open by the end of Feb/March for The Batman (Kids are going back to school on Monday) but it really just matters if Warner Bros USA moves the release date. But the HBO Max release thing in the US is done, it killed their 2021 box office (highest grossing WB film – Dune at 40 million opening weekend). And since Spidey made 1.6 billion dollars at the start of the Omincron wave I get the feeling WB is going to stick with the March date due to y’know, greed. I just saw today that No Way Home is slotted for Feb 28th digital release and I was really hoping it would be sooner than that, it’s certainly longer than 45 days and I want to see it again ASAP, especially without theatres open and case numbers so high.
Pixar really lost something when it quit releasing shorts with each film. Dumping their features into the streaming trough doesn’t help. That group used to be a magic factory.
Didn’t the guy responsible for the magic turn out to be a sex pest?
I really think the sale to Disney was the beginning of the end. Yeah the slide didn’t begin right away, but they were kidding themselves if they thought they’d be able to keep creating in the same fashion once they fell under the umbrella of the most notoriously controlling, brand conscious content creator of them all.
John Lasseter is running a new studio and Apple seems to be gobbling up everything from them and dumping more money in their lamps. I’m pretty optimistic about where it’s going to lead based on the talent he has over there and will continue to be able to fund with their backing.
It is disappointing, especially because Disney still does it with their own animated features.I think they stopped really because the shorts were just animation exercises (like fur textures and such). Now they’re being made as tests for potential directors and there’s more of them being made than films being released, so they’ve gotta go somewhere.
But in this case, letting Shi loose to make the wonderful Bao almost certainly gave her the opportunity to helm a full feature. Using the shorts as minor leagues makes great sense.
Pixar’s golden run wasn’t going to last forever. A Disney-owned company was always going to start streamlining more films at a faster pace by a certain point. I’ll always be grateful for growing up on those first eleven films from Toy Story up to Toy Story 3 all coming out in a row.
Pixar’s greatest mistake was making Cars. Not because it’s mediocre but because it was easily turned into a giant merchandising empire. At one point, around when Cars 3 came out, someone at Pixar admitted that the Cars movies basically pay the bills. They make more money on its merchandise then every other movie in that 11 year run combined.
Considering Disney’s current CEO’s background is merchandising, we can probably expect several more Cars movies.
Lord knows my family contributed to that. The cast miniatures were pretty awesome, well-made and about twice the size of typical Hot Wheels.
You’re right – Toy Story 3 is really the dividing line. Everything before that is pretty much golden.Immediately after… three misfires in a row. CARS 2, BRAVE, MONSTERS UNIVERSITY. They’ve been extremely hit and miss ever since…. maybe one solid film for every 2-3 misses. And even the hits don’t hit the same heights.
I thought Monsters U was equal or surpassed Monsters Inc., but yeah, you’re not wrong.
No offense, but man do I completely disagree with you. Inside Out, Finding Dory, Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Soul and Luca are amazing films. They absolutely have the same magic that Pixar always had. I’m thinking you got older and are watching movies through a different filter now. Because each of them were absolutely magical.
To each their own. I’m happy you enjoyed them, but I’d offer up the same list as evidence that Pixar has gone from making brain-exploding classics to merely pretty good films. Inside Out, for my money, is the best of that list. The rest fluctuate from just-ok to very good, with a healthy dose of pat (and sometimes twee) sentimentality. And, to be fair, some of us were already old watching their earlier work, so it’s not like we all had some kind of childlike-wonder bias that makes us dislike the recent stuff. 🙂
No, I think those movies are pretty good. Especially Inside Out and Coco. Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun, too. I’m not criticizing them. I liked Onward.I just don’t think they’re quite as amazing as Pixar’s initial run. Or as good as Moana, frankly, if we’re looking at contemporaries.Nemo > DoryIncredibles > Incredibles 2TS4 < the first three Toy StoriesAnd those are the hits. The misses - “Good Dinosaur”, “Cars 3", “Brave”, and *especially* “Cars 2" are just not there, for me. Cars 2 has a full-on State Farm ad in it, sung by Larry the Cable Guy. Pixar shouldn’t be for sale like that.
Soul… I liked it a LOT. I wish they hadn’t done the “stuck in a body of a cat” thing. I think Wolfwalkers was a much better movie and should have won that Oscar.
I’d argue Brave and MU are both very good. Not full-on excellent, but I wouldn’t call them misfires either.
I’ll accept MU, but I’m drawing the line with Brave. That was a mess as soon as they got into the “people turning into bears” hijinks. It was a completely other movie, and that movie wasn’t very good.
I don’t think Disney can be entirely blamed. The reality is that the individual directors from the golden era (John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird) never really wavered much in their Pixar output outside of Lasseter’s Cars obsession, which was weirdly personal for him. Things got questionable when that initial run of pitches was finished and new talent stepped up to the plate, which isn’t dissimilar to what happened with Disney itself in the 50s and 60s.
I mean, yeah, but also COVID?
They are still making shorts but they are dumping them on Disney+ as well
It’s a shame the Sparkshorts aren’t getting more promotion because they’ve been consistently good and often excellent (“Kitbull”, “Wind” and “Twentysomething” come to mind).
They keep making them though so I assume they must justify their existence. They are appointment TV for the family when new ones come out.
As blood&chocolate said, Pixar’s Golden run wasn’t going to last forever. The Disney Renaissance ended too. Losing John Lasseter clearly had a negative impact on their creative process. There’s a variety of reasons Pixar has lost a step, part of it certainly being that these things are cyclical. Their recent output has still been solid…While I thought Soul was incredibly overrated, I really enjoyed the whimsy of Onward and the simplicity of Luca.It’s far too simple to say that Disney buying Pixar “ruined” them or is the reason for their decline. In the intervening years—and even a few before Lasseter left—Disney Animation has flourished, finding historic success with a wide variety of hits including Tangled, Wreck-It-Ralph, Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Frozen, etc. Don’t read too much into the Pixar movies being direct release on Dis+. Family movies in theaters is probably the toughest movie to sell during covid. There’s a reason Encanto was only in theaters 2-3 weeks before it was released on Dis+.
Yes! I have a kid who’s almost ten who has never seen the inside of a movie theater, and I said this could be their first movie. I was really dreading it because, you know, I hate whenever I see a kid in a movie theater. Plus I would’ve had to take my younger kid as well. That meant about six trips to the bathroom, spilled popcorn and drinks, and complaints about wanting to leave/being bored. This is fantastic news.
Pixar is becoming the Disney+ house studio for animated films.
Only slightly off-topic, the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk, Virginia, got a new female Red Panda named Sunny a few years ago. Red Pandas resemble and behave a lot like a raccoons. This one turned out to be an escape artist and disappeared in 2017, never to be seen again…https://www.pilotonline.com/news/vp-nw-fz20-sunny-panda-cold-case-20201124-bi6ebi36end3javpsufhofquka-story.html
She obviously turned into a little girl.
That’s as plausible a theory as any. There are lots of kids in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. The way the schools are now, all she’d have to do is turn in her homework and pass the SOLs and they’d never catch on. She could easily blend in and never get caught.Call the zoo. We’ve solved the case!
Still wanted by the government, this red panda survives as a soldier of fortune. If you have a problem…if no one else can help…and if you can find them… maybe you can hire…I’m not sure what they are calling themselves these days.
Call the zoo! I have a lead on the vehicle she’s driving.
The Pand-A Team
Oh no! I hope she’s living her best life somewhere. Cute as hell!
Yes, definitely cute. Let’s hope she’s hiding out and living it up!
My best guess, she ended up as some hick’s pet, along their 4 hounds and other two raccoons.
And then…dinner.
Who’s dinner? The hicks’ or the hounds’?
I expect she wandered off into the woods and is living undetected 1/2 a mile from the zoo at this very moment.
We all hope so.
I lost my mother a few years before Bao. I ugly-cried at that short and I’m pretty sure made the family in front of me at the movie theater uncomfortable. Oh well!
I lost my dad at 19, and luckily, got to watch Onward at home and ugly cried in the privacy of my own home!
Anyone attending a Pixar film should fully expect to experience widespread ugly crying. They all grab different people in different ways at different points in the film. Except Up, of course. That was like some sort of social experiment.
I’m not sure where “2015″ comes from, but Domee has definitely been with Pixar since way before then.
The fact is right now people have to weight getting sick to go see a movie and I suspect it will still be that way in March. People will make that choice for a Marvel movie it seems but I don’t think an animated kids movie is gonna move that needle for most. I’m not sure Covid killed the theater industry but I suspect certain genres showing in theaters may never recover. Kids movies, serious drama and romantic comedies for sure. Theaters are gonna be all giant blockbusters, horror flicks and really broad 4-quadrant comedies(and even maybe not those).
Really, most of those were dead before covid. Netflix, for example, really is the only company that has been making John Hughes-ish teen romantic comedy comedies in the last 5 years or so.
True but I think Covid nailed the coffins shut.
Yeah, Encanto struggled at the box office during its theatrical window and only now that it’s streaming is there a lot of chatter about it.
I don’t know, if we’ve seen anything it’s that a lot of people have decided they’re going back into public no matter what. With Omicron not being as severe as feared and the holiday gathering season where it spread so rapidly behind us, not to mention seemingly every other person having it by now, I think we’ll see the new normal pretty quickly. I.e. some people will avoid theaters and other public spaces, many more will not.
I think we may see the new normal by the spring but I think early March is cutting it close.
I don’t mean that in the sense that Omicron will have burned itself out (agree that’s optimistic), but that people will simply have processed enough information to decide how they plan to live their lives regardless. E.g. going to theaters or not.
It’s great that you live somewhere where that choice isn’t being made for you (shouted all the way from Ontario).
That’s one ugly red panda.
That probably helps explain why Disney and Pixar have been so comfortable turning the last two Pixar projects (Soul and Luca) over to the relative safety of Disney+Not that I expect the current AV Club to give a flying fickle finger of fate about what’s going on in the Empire of Mouse, but: There were already rumblings of Pixar employees being upset when Luca got a Disney+ release, particularly since Disney’s own Raya and the Last Dragon had a Premier Access window before Luca. Now that Turning Red is going to D+ after Encanto had a theatrical release, I’m going to be paying very close attention to scuttlebutt from Emeryville.she turns into a giant red panda bearRed pandas aren’t a variety of panda bears, or any type of bear; they’re the only surviving species of the family Ailuridae, itself part of the Musteloidea superfamily that also encompasses Mephitidae (skunks), Procyonidae (raccoons, coatis, etc.), and Mustelidae (weasels, ferrets, etc.).Anyway, I’m looking forward to the movie, as I’m in the camp that considers “Bao” to be one of Pixar’s better shorts. I just hope that someday I’ll be able to see it on the big screen, along with Soul, Luca, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto…(Yes, I know Encanto got a theatrical release, but living in an extremely red area with high proportion of the population at risk for serious COVID infections, I’m not willing to risk spreading the disease just for the sake of seeing a film in a theater. We’ll see how things look after the Omicron wave has passed; this might finally be a step in the right direction.)
I streamed Encanto and, save your money on seeing it on the big screen imho. The character animation and visuals are stunning but the story is not great. At about the same time, I realized/remembered that I had never seen Moana so I streamed that the next day and wow, it’s not even close how much better Moana is to Encanto.Turning Red looks good but if Disney had any faith in it, they would’ve pushed it back. The fact that we are (naively) hopefully at the peak of omicron and things will get back to “normal”/preomicron in a month or two, and Disney is just pushing this onto D+ tells me that it’s either a political move with Pixar or it’s just not that good. I’ll see it anyway because I don’t not watch Pixar movies but something seems amiss.
Turning Red just seems like a concept that would work better as a short than a feature, at least so far. Frankly, I think the promotional efforts should just explain why the girl transforms in the first place, as that at least would point to an actual plot to the thing.
Possibly…I’m looking forward to it no matter if it’s streamed or not. I usually give Pixar the benefit of the doubt. Onward did not look interesting at all to me after seeing the trailer but it’s one of my favorite Pixar movies in the last couple of years.
I’ve since learned that the final trailer explains that, so it’s crow pot pie for dinner for me.
I really want to watch Moana while I’m tripping balls
Watched Encanto with the spouse last night. It’s just kind of a weird movie, narratively and structurally. The conflict isn’t well defined, and what muddled conflict does exist is shallow and wrapped up with no thought or explanation. (Like, Ok, the banished Uncle is back, no questions or hard feelings! Wtf?)Also, it has very few songs but the two character songs are pretty enjoyable. Which is why I don’t get why everyone with powers doesn’t get a song? It would have made the message muuuuuuch clearer and just made the storytelling itself more understandable. Spouse and I had a hard time figuring out who was who and who could do what.It was pretty though and I enjoyed the character design. (Watched Wreck it Ralph recently and I didn’t like it. Felt overdone and underexplained, like it was created in a lab. Also watched Brave. I liked the story much better than Encanto but man, there was just something off about the animation. I think the textures just weren’t right. Pore-less balloon like skin textures. It made a very expensively animated film look cheap to me. Also, I’m just fucking sick of the bobble head character design era.)
My thoughts exactly…but I loved Wreck-It-Ralph!
Encanto was also weird in that the ending immediately undercut the lesson of the film. Everyone working together, and now suddenly everyone has their gifts back again? Except of course for the main character, and someone who’s gift was very much unwelcome – but I guess we just don’t talk about Bruno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“Bao” is a little creepy when one of the dumplings the woman was going to eat turns out to be sentient and she raises it and then we find out it was her son all along. What the fuck was that about?
You did watch it through to the end to see it was a dream, y/y? Brought on by her stress over her broken relationship with her son, which was slowly back on the way to being repaired by the end of the credits? AKA the point of the entire thing?
Odd that someone named “Soylent Green” can’t see the analogy but, instead, sees something a “little creepy”. 😛
It’s very specifically about the semi-toxic relationship Asian parents have to their offspring.
They have red pandas at the Atlanta zoo (or did some years ago). I saw the sign and was psyched to check them out, only to discover they’re basically reddish raccoons.
Can we not use the word “meager” for a value near or above 100M? Every year, a depressing number of great films make nowhere near half a single million, and 140M is somehow lacking, especially at the onset of a global pandemic.
Hmmm. Onward opened on March 6, 2020 and was moved onto Disney+ on March 20, 2020. This was less than two years ago and not three years ago. The reason that it did not make its budget back was because of the shut down and not due to generalized failure of Pixar movies to make money for Disney. I know that this does not fit the narrative but sometimes trying to shape facts into a predetermined narrative really shows a lack of journalistic or editorial integrity. If anything the story should really be that Disney has become Extremely risk avoidance when it comes to releasing anything into the theater since March 2020. Just look at the release schedule. And also please refer to Black Widow, Shang Chi etc.
It’s been nearly three years now since Onward—the last Pixar film to get anything resembling a wide theatrical release—became one of the first cinematic victims of the COVID-19 pandemicIt hasn’t even been 2 years. Onward/Release dateMarch 6, 2020