Pixar CCO Pete Docter on LGBTQ Themes Being Cut From ‘Elio’

Pixar‘s chief creative officer Pete Docter is explaining why the Disney-owned company settled on cutting LGBTQ themes from their 2025 film Elio.

In a new interview with the Wall Street Journal, Docter explained that Pixar did not want their film to force parents to have conversations they weren’t ready to discuss with their children. “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy,” he said.

The Hollywood Reporter previously reported on the lengthy reworking of Elio, which spotlights the story of a lonely boy who is beamed into outer spake after being mistaken as the leader of Earth. The film was originally slated to be directed by Adrian Molina, with the main character of Elio initially being portrayed a queer-coded. After an early screening in the summer of 2023 in Arizona, where viewers reportedly said they liked the movie but no one raised their hand when asked if they’d see it in a movie theater, shifts followed.

Molina later exited the project, as co-directors Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi stepped in to helm the film. A former Pixar artist who worked on Elio told THR anonymously, “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.”

Elio opened to record-low numbers for Pixar, debuting to $20.8 million domestically and $14 million overseas. At the time, the film arrived as Pixar’s first original film following Elemental, which debuted to $29.6 million domestic in 2023, marking the second-worst three-day weekend start in the company’s history.

Hoppers, which released Friday, is the first Pixar movie to trail Elio, with a projected global box office debut of $88 million.

“As time’s gone on, I realized my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody,” Docter said elsewhere in his WSJ profile.