Pixar’s Pandemic Disney+ Releases Are Finally Headed To Theaters
'Soul', 'Luca' and 'Turning Red' will be released over the opening months of 2024
Disney punted about half a dozen films or more out of the 2024 release calendar instead of meeting the demands of their talent sooner than this past fall. What’s a studio to do to patch up these self-inflicted wounds? Well, do something long overdue. Pixar is finally giving Soul, Luca, and Turning Red the theatrical releases they deserve, having been moved to Disney+ releases over the course of the (height of the) COVID-19 pandemic. Tickets go on sale January 2.
Indeed, instead of just those award-qualifying limited runs in New York and Los Angeles that the moves to the streamer necessitated, these are full-blown nationwide releases. Soul, directed by Pete Docter, co-directed by Kemp Powers and starring Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey, kicks things off with a January 12 release. By no coincidence, the film has taken Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend. What is a coincidence however is that it opens the same weekend as the movie adaptation of the Mean Girls musical, written by and starring Fey, from Paramount Pictures. Also opening with it are The Beekeeper from Amazon-MGM and Sony/Tristar’s The Book of Clarence. Burrow, the Pixar Sparkshort that was attached as far back as the intended June 19, 2020 theatrical release before being released together straight to the streamer, will continue the partnership with their actual theatrical release.
Next up is the film whose shift to Disney+ was most contentious, 2022’s Turning Red. Releasing February 9, it seems an intentionally timed Lunar/Chinese New Year release, as in 2024 the occasion comes the next day, February 10, and the Domee Shi-directed film is about an Asian-Canadian and her family. The decision to change the release plan came at the height of the Omicron variant in January 2022, two months ahead of release. Being the third Pixar film in a row for such to happen to, it drew the ire not only of film and animation fans, but even Pixar animators spoke publicly about their disappointment, that their triumphant return to the big screen turned into “quite a blow” for morale, even if some were understanding of the circumstances. By the time the March release happened, Omicron had passed and to many, it felt like the move had been for nothing. It was like salt in the wound. It opens against the Zelda Williams-directed, Diablo Cody-written Lisa Frankenstein, starring Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse, and It Ends With Us from Columbia Pictures, directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Blake Lively. The 2019 SparkShort Kitbull, whose original public release was on YouTube (where it passed 100 million views in August) has been tapped to precede it.
And finally, there’s Luca, whose initial theatrical release was silenced (domestically) in what could best be considered Disney testing if it was safe to come out of the water. It was in the same shuffle that landed films like Black Widow, Free Guy, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to their final release dates. Now that it’s finally gotten a major United States theatrical release, set for March 22 it’s been burdened as a much more direct replacement than the others in this class, as it’s for two punted films. The first is Elio, which was supposed to be the next Pixar film, which was dated for March 1, and the live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which previously had the exact date. Luca now most directly faces off against Arthur the King starring Mark Wahlberg and Simu Liu from Lionsgate and eOne. Luca, Alberto, and Giulia bring with them by far the oldest short and that probably wouldn’t have been attached in its originally-intended release, the classic For the Birds, whose general release was originally with Monsters Inc. in 2001.
The new release that Pixar is left with for this year is Inside Out 2, which comes on June 14. Elio won’t be releasing until the same weekend (June 13) the following year.
