Embracing authenticity leads to profit
How Pixar’s course correction following PR blunder made Coco a huge box-office hit
Over the weekend, audiences in the rest of North America flocked to what Mexican moviegoers had affirmed more than a month ago: Coco is an authentically appealing winner.
The Disney/Pixar animated film soared to a US$71.2 million domestic debut to win the five-day holiday frame, topping such superhero behemoths as Justice League and Thor: Ragnarok, according to studio estimates Sunday. Coco grossed US$49 million for the threeday domestic weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, and has now pulled in a total of US$153.4 million worldwide.
All the positive commercial and critical reception — Coco is rated 96 per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes — reflects how wise Pixar was to begin listening to its critics four years ago.
The company was about two years into the making of Coco when it committed a significant PR blunder. For its marketing, Disney in 2013 applied to trademark “Dia de los Muertos” — the Mexican holiday that the movie centres on — sparking a backlash from prominent Latino voices.
Mexican-American cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz (La Cucaracha) helped give image to the outcry. Alcaraz, who had tweeted that trying to brand the holiday came across as “awful and crass,” created the Mickey Mouse-spoofing cartoon Muerto Mouse, with the caption: “It’s coming to trademark your cultura.”
According to Jason Katz, the story supervisor on Coco, the backlash to the trademark attempt by Disney (which is based in Southern California) was tough to take in the Bay Area, where Pixar’s studio is located.
“Working at Pixar, you’re in a little bit of a bubble — we’re removed from the machine to a certain extent,” Katz says. “(We were) trying to be as genuine and authentic as you can. It wasn’t something we were expecting. We were all just disappointed and sad.”
The incident, though, led to a realization. “We needed to make sure that even though we were reaching out to folks, we needed to make this movie differently than any other movie we’d made,” says Katz, who has been with the studio since its first feature film, 1995’s Toy Story. “We needed to maybe not keep our cards so close to our chest.”
To course-correct for such blind spots, Pixar hired three key consultants: Marcela Davison Avilés, longtime president of the Mexican Heritage Corporation; playwright Octavio Solis; and Alcaraz himself.
Alcaraz gives the studio credit concerning Coco, which he notes is co-directed by rising young talent Adrian Molina, who is of Mexican descent. “Pixar was already on its way to making this a culturally authentic film and we met somewhere in the middle,” Alcaraz says. “And even though I’m not very corporate, they listened to what I had to say.”
Katz says that Coco, a six-year project, was anchored by a central mission: The filmmakers “were just trying to find a story that feels like it’s worthy to be in the world.”
Coco, with more than US$48 million in ticket sales, is now the biggest film in Mexican history.