The version of Pixar’s Elio that performed poorly at the box office in June — delivering the Disney-owned animation studio’s worst opening weekend to date — was reportedly reworked to remove its title character’s queerness.

Sources who worked at Pixar during the film’s troubled production told The Hollywood Reporter that original director Adrian Molina, who is gay, never intended Elio to be a coming-out story, while others said its title character was initially queer-coded. They cited multiple scenes that were ultimately cut from the theatrical releases, including one in which 11-year-old Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) puts on a “trash-ion show” while cleaning up a beach, and another in which pictures displayed in the character’s bedroom suggested a male crush.

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“It was pretty clear through the production of the first version of the film that [studio leaders] were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio’s sexuality of being queer,” one former Pixar artist old the outlet.

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THR reports that Molina screened a cut of the film that was nearly completed for Pixar leadership back in 2023 and may have been “hurt” by chief creative officer Pete Docter’s feedback. Soon after, Molina exited the project, with Pixar announcing that co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi would take over.

Former Pixar assistant editor Sarah Ligatich provided feedback on the film as a member of Pixar’s LGBTQ+ group PixPRIDE, according to THR. She told the outlet that she “was deeply saddened and aggrieved by the changes that were made” to Elio after Molina’s departure. She claims that an “exodus” of creatives who worked on the film after seeing Sharafian and Shi’s first cut “was really indicative of how unhappy a lot of people were that they had changed and destroyed this beautiful work.”

“Suddenly, you remove this big, key piece, which is all about identity, and Elio just becomes about totally nothing,” the former Pixar artist said. “The Elio that is in theaters right now is far worse than Adrian’s best version of the original.”

Disney and Pixar have come under fire from both conservatives and the LGBTQ+ community in recent years for including queer representation in films like 2022’s Strange World and Toy Story spinoff Lightyear and for removing it from projects like Disney+ series Win or Lose. As THR notes, Docter was quoted in a 2024 interview as saying that Pixar needed to make the “most relatable films” possible, leading some to worry that the studio would retreat from including queer characters and perspectives in its movies.

“A lot of people like to blame Disney, but the call is coming from inside the house,” the former Pixar artist told THR. “A lot of it is obeying-in-advance behavior, coming from the higher execs at Pixar.”

The same artist suggested that reworking the film to erase its queer subtext likely cost Disney and Pixar significantly more than releasing Molina’s original version. Elio opened on June 22, bringing in just $20.8 million domestically — the lowest opening weekend haul in the studio’s history, according to THR — against what the former artist speculated may have been a more than $200 million budget.

“I’d love to ask Pete and the other Disney executives whether or not they thought the rewrite was worth it,” the artist said. “Would they have lost this much money if they simply let Adrian tell his story?”

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