Pixar's Elio has had the worst-ever box office opening for a film from the animation studio. It's part of a wave of original family cartoons failing at the box office.

In big-time animation studio Pixar's new cartoon, Elio, a boy is beamed up from Earth and into outer space, but the film itself hasn't taken off. The film made just $21m (£15m) at the US box office over its opening weekend, and $14m (£10m) globally, which counts as the worst ever opening of a Pixar film. DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon sold almost twice as many tickets, despite having been out for a week already. And even Danny Boyle's shot-on-an-iPhone zombie adventure 28 Years Later pulled in more viewers.

What a difference a year makes. Last June, Pixar's previous film, Inside Out 2, was well on its way to making almost $1.7 billion, and cementing its status as 2024's biggest film worldwide. And it wasn't alone. An article in the Times last December hailed 2024 as "a new era for family films", adding that "the pandemic slump is officially over and a new saviour of the box office has returned to Hollywood". Other child-friendly titles cited in the article were Despicable Me 4, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, and Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which together had made about $6.85 billion.

But while it's hard to argue with the figures, it's just as hard to ignore that the fact that all of these films revolve around existing intellectual properties. This year, the biggest family films include A Minecraft Movie and live-action CGI remakes of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. But the crashing and burning of Elio suggests that it's much more challenging for films to succeed if they aren't sequels, prequels, remakes, adaptations of video games, or some unholy combination of the above. When it comes to younger viewers, it seems, it's lack of familiarity that breeds contempt.

There have been some original children's films that have been profitable recently, including The Bad Guys and The Wild Robot (although both are adapted from books). But what we haven't seen lately is the kind of newly minted mega-hit that sells toys and gets turned into a Broadway musical: the days of such franchise-starting phenomena as

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