Even though it can’t be argued that Disney is on one of its most disastrous runs of the modern era when it comes to nothing but cold, hard box office bombs, Elemental has continued proving that maybe anointing any movie as a flop after its opening weekend is jumping the gun ever so slightly.
After all, the most recent fixture from animated powerhouse Pixar only rustled up $29.6 million through its first three days in domestic theaters, which marked the lowest launch for any of the studio’s features dating all the way back to 1995 and its first-ever, and even at that Elemental only exceeded Toy Story by a few hundred thousand dollars.
And yet, it’s been showing incredible legs to continue racking up additional revenue every single weekend since first releasing all the way back on June 14, to the extent that it’s now overtaken a pair of high-profile comic book adaptations both internationally and on a global scale.
Having crossed $478 million this weekend, Elemental has now exceeded the lifetime gross of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, with an international haul of $325 million taking it beyond the overseas earnings of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Not bad for an acclaimed original that was being proclaimed as a money-losing misfire just days after it was made available to the world. Sure, Disney has still experienced more misses than hits over the last couple of years, but it just goes to show that you can never write anything off as a failure until the project in question has had a chance to prove itself.