Why Cars 3 Might Be a Box Office Disappointment For Pixar — And It’s Their Own Fault

Cars 3 hit the box office this weekend, earning the top spot even though it opened at $13 million less than 2011’s Cars 2.

Other than 2015’s The Good Dinosaur ($29 million) and 2007’s Ratatouille ($47 million), there hasn’t been a Pixar movie to open at less than Cars 3 since the turn of the century. All time, only A Bug’s Life and Toy Story join the list, meaning that Cars 3 has one of the five lowest openings in Pixar’s history and the lowest opening ever for a sequel (Toy Story 2, Monsters University, and Cars 2 all had bigger openings — and Finding Dory‘s was absolutely massive).

All that comes in spite of the movie being received fairly warmly by critics and audiences so far. The movie has a 65% score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to Cars 2‘s 39%. The original Cars earned a 74%.

So, what went wrong?

(To the extent that anything can be said to be wrong with a $50 million opening that puts you at the top of the box office, that is.)

Well, the first two Cars films weren’t exactly classics, and the brand has been watered down by a bunch of tie-ins and spinoffs seemingly created for no reason other than to sell more toys. It’s also been over five years since the previous Cars film, which in that time has earned a reputation as Pixar’s worst movie to date. So Cars 3, even if very good, had a lot against it from the starting gun.

We’ve put together a handy-dandy guide to some of the biggest missteps taken with the franchise below.

“GIT ‘R DONE”

Bringing in Larry the Cable Guy (real name Dan Whitney) to play Mater, the dim-witted tow truck, was always a kind of odd piece of stunt casting, but it’s not as though Pixar is above such things in other, better movies, so it was easy to not put too much thought into it.

Cars itself wasn’t a great movie, especially by Pixar standards, but it was perfectly serviceable and some parts worked really well.

In the final race, though, there’s a moment where Mater is cheering on Lightning McQueen and screams “git ‘r done,” Whitney’s stand-up comedy catchphrase which, at the time of Cars‘s theatrical release, was ubiquitously merchandised.

The line underscores a problem a lot of people have with the Cars franchise as a whole: for Pixar, one of the most creative and artistically talented studios in the history of film, the whole thing feels a bit like a cynical cash grab designed to sell more toys, with little actual quality control.

Allowing your comic relief character, then, to insert his real-world marketing catchphrase feels like a confirmation of that complaint.

 

CARS TOONS

The success of Cars as a brand (moreso than as a movie), combined with the long gestation period of any Pixar film, resulted in a series of animated shorts, done mostly for television, called Cars Toons.

There were two varieties of Toons: “Tales From Radiator Springs,” which appear to be canon within the universe of the Cars movies, and “Mater’s Tall Tales,” which are not.

Oddly, “Mater’s Tall Tales” appears to have provided the template followed by Cars 2.

While some Pixar tie-ins (such as Planes, which takes place in the world of Cars) are animated by Disney Animation rather than Pixar itself, the Cars Toons shorts are actually Pixar, which makes them marginally better than they otherwise might be…but not actually good.

Significantly more than half of the Cars Toons were of the “Mater’s Tall Tales” variety, which served as an object lesson in how difficult it is to take a popular supporting character and build a stand-alone story or stories around them without losing what makes them special…and these shorts, along with tie-in video games, helped to establish what would become a pattern pervasive to the movies, too: replacing actors who had passed away so that their characters could live on.

That, of course, isn’t an uncommon practice in animation (or performed fiction as a whole) but it sticks out particularly in the Cars franchise because while Joe Ranft (Red) and George Carlin (Fillmore) were replaced, the movies have taken great care to pay tribute to Paul Newman (Doc Hudson), whose character was killed off-screen between the movies.

 

PLANES

At some point, Disney decided “Who needs Pixar to tell stories set in the world of Pixar’s Cars films? What if we just made our own?”

And they did, as contractually they are allowed to do.

The Planes movies — particularly the first one — aren’t among the worst Disney animated sequels of all time. Not even close.

(We’re looking at you, Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas!)

That said, following the largely-forgettable Cars Toons, which were Mater-centric and set the stage for the reviled Cars 2, the franchise’s brand was already tarnished, and Planes — heavily marketed as “From the world of Cars” and originally intended as a direct-to-DVD movie before test screenings showed that people loved it — only served to further water it down.

The second Planes movie, which did go direct-to-video, wasn’t awful…but it was Cars Toons-level, and definitely wasn’t good enough to have merited a feature-length treatment. That the premise of the second movie had basically nothing in common with the premise of the first, making it feel like neither story mattered so much as “hey, here’s a bunch of characters we know your kids will watch” probably contributed to that.

 

CARS 2

There is a lot not to like about Cars 2.

Where the Toy Story sequels played in a world that kept expanding and used the growth of the toys’ owner Andy as a kind of timeline against which everything could play, the second Cars movie felt like a continuation of the first. Time had passed, but Mater hadn’t matured, Lightning was still pretty self-involved, and basically nothing they did with the film’s universe or the animation was a step up or a step forward from what had been established in Cars.

The decision to center on Mater was a poor one, likely born out of the fact that he sold toys and merchandising effectively and that kids on the Disney’s TV channels had enjoyed the Cars Toons. In any event, as we hinted earlier, it’s virtually impossible to take a popular side character and turn them successfully into the star of their own story.

The fact that Lego Batman managed to earn strong reviews is a testament to the strength of those storytellers but also to the wide recognition that Batman already has; there’s a cultural shorthand for him that doesn’t exist for a character like Mater, and so people who had only seen the first movie were left wondering why the heck he was suddenly the main character.

The spy plot, like the decision to make Planes: Fire and Rescue a movie about first responders, was the kind of thing that might have been more interesting if it had been built into the foundations of the series but it feels tacked on and basically says “We couldn’t think of a really good way to follow up our race car movie, so…here: Car spies!”

The poor reviews didn’t slow down Cars 2‘s box office much, but ultimately it earned less than Cars did domestically and the third movie has now had an opening that’s less than either of its precursors in spite of the rise of 3D and other premium formats with higher ticket prices in the intervening years.

 

THE GAP

One of the least-controllable things that may hurt Cars 3 at the box office is the lengthy production time between each of the three films.

Cars 3 is coming out 11 years after Cars — and to put that in perspective, Iron Man spawned 2 sequels in 5 years…less than the time it took for Cars 2 to come out.

That’s not always a guarantee of failure: Pixar did alright with Monsters University, has done big money with each successive Toy Story, and blew away expectations with Finding Dory, all in spite of long gestation periods.

That it took so long to get made, though, probably hurts Cars 3 in part because of how poorly received the second film was.

Let’s look at Man of Steel, for instance: the film started at around 25 percentage points lower on Rotten Tomatoes among critics than among fans. In the four years since that movie was released, not only has that margin tightened by 5 percentage points, but it’s done so with the critical consensus falling an additional 4%, meaning that the audience’s view of Man of Steel is close to 10% poorer now than it was at the time of its release.

There are a number of possible reasons for this, but it would be difficult to argue that at least one of those reasons wasn’t the film’s controversial and oft-maligned nature. After four years of being told that a film is bad, it’s pretty easy to be a bit less charitable when you sit down to decide whether it’s a three-, four-, or five-star film.

The same can be said for Cars 2. The fact that it has earned a reputation in the six years since its release as “The Shame of Pixar” almost certainly has hurt its long-term reputation and possibly curbed interest by casual moviegoers in the sequel.

Couple that with the fact that this is a kid-film franchise — and that it’s been 11 years since the last really “good” one came out — and you have a recipe for much of the target audience for the first movie having aged out of watching the sequels by now.