Still haven’t seen Pixar’s amazing Coco? Do you have plans to arrive 20 minutes late to avoid that infamous short you’ve heard about? You can relax…the short’s gone.
In 2016 a Frozen TV special was announced revolving around Olaf and set to air during the 2017 Yuletide season. Earlier this year the decision was made to bump the special up to a theatrical screening by putting it in front of Pixar’s Coco. All TV ads for the movie made no mention of this, leaving families blindsided when they came to see Pixar’s latest and instead got a snowman waddling around looking for Christmas traditions. In some cases people have thought they walked into the wrong movie or that the projectionist messed up.
As a TV special it would have been the right length, but as a “short” its 21-minute runtime was unexpected. The special has been viewed by most moviegoers as vastly inferior to the Pixar movie it’s been paired with, and pretty much soured people on the prospect of Frozen 2. We aren’t alone in that sentiment — in Mexico, where Coco is an even bigger hit, all theaters voluntarily removed Olaf’s Frozen Adventure from screenings after just one week.
Disney has heard the screams and tweets and announced that they are officially following Mexico’s lead. Starting December 7, Olaf will no longer screen in front of Coco. The studio has suggested theaters add extra screenings of Coco into their schedule to make up the difference. Coco director Alfred Molina had to admit it was an experiment that didn’t quite work out.
“This year, we came out with two films: We had Cars 3 in the summer, and then Coco in the fall,” Molina said to Yahoo. “Attached to Cars 3 was Lou, a [Pixar] short that we had developed in the studio. But for Coco, we didn’t have anything ready for it. And so Disney [Animation] contacted us and said, ‘We’ve got this Frozen short, and it’s kind of in the same wheelhouse in that it deals with the themes of family traditions and knowing what your family traditions are.’ And were like, oh, that sounds like a nice pairing. It is longer than any short that has preceded one of our films before. So that was a little bit of an experiment.”