“We had a similar creative wave for Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up,” added Collins. So I think with Finding Nemo, we were the beneficiaries of a nice run.” “I think there was a wave effect, where people said, ‘I loved that one, so I trust that I can go to the next one,’ and it compounded. “There’s no way to prove this, but I remember watching the same thing kind of happen from The Little Mermaid to Beauty and the Beast to Aladdin to The Lion King: They kept getting bigger in their receptions,” said Stanton. To figure out the franchise’s magic formula, we recently sat down with director Andrew Stanton (who helmed both Nemo and Dory, as well as Pixar’s Wall-E) and producer Lindsey Collins to get their takes.Īsk Stanton for his gut read on how Finding Nemo became such a big hit, and he’ll modestly credit the two Pixar movies that came before it, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.

(It took former record-holders Shrek 2 and Toy Story 3 seven days longer to reach that milestone.) At this pace, Dory is likely to finish its domestic run as Pixar’s biggest-ever grosser and perhaps even the highest-grossing animated film of all time, and that’s awfully fitting given that its predecessor, 2003’s Finding Nemo, also spent several years as Pixar’s most successful film.īut what is it about these movies in particular that makes them such box-office behemoths? With Pixar films quality is a given, but the continued adventures of Dory, Marlin, and Nemo trump even the studio’s critically acclaimed Toy Story series. Its $136.1 million opening-weekend gross was an all-time animated record, and the film easily breezed past $300 million two days ago, a benchmark Dory hit in just 11 days. When it comes to box-office records, Finding Dory has redefined how high an animated film can go.

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