Disney and Pixar announced on Monday that their animated feature Elemental, starring Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie, has scored the biggest movie premiere of the year to date on Disney+, earning 26.4 million views in its first five days on the service.
The result, calculated by dividing total stream time by runtime, positions the film as one of the Top 10 in the history of the streamer, as far as premieres. The flick directed by Peter Sohn is the most viewed-animated feature to come out of Disney/Pixar since Turning Red was released last March and has also notably bested that Oscar-nominated Domee Shi pic with the biggest Latin American Disney+ movie premiere of all time.
Elemental is set in Element City, where Fire-, Water-, Earth-, and Air-residents live together. The story follows the quick-witted and fiery Ember (Lewis), whose friendship with the sappy and go-with-the-flow Wade (Athie) challenges not only her beliefs about the world they live in, but the person she wants to be. Denise Ream produced, with Pete Docter exec producing.
Released in June, Elemental proved a theatrical success despite the expectations of some pundits after benefiting from a long tail in theatrical viewership around the world. It boasts an “A” CinemaScore, a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and has grossed over $484M worldwide. Domestically, the film generated $154 million — more than 5x its domestic opening weekend of $30 million, a rare feat for any theatrical release and the second-highest multiple behind Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story back in 1995. Internationally, the film brought in $330 million and had a particularly strong showing in South Korea, becoming Pixar’s most-seen film in the country.
John Hoberg & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh scripted Elemental from a story by Sohn, Hoberg & Likkel, and Hsueh. Pic’s voice cast also includes Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O’Hara, Mason Wertheimer, and Joe Pera.
