Disney will be removing the short film Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, featuring the snowman character from Disney’s Frozen, which had been preceding screenings of the hit Pixar film Coco following poor critical and audience reaction.
Mashable has confirmed that the order has gone out to remove Olaf’s Frozen Adventure from in front of screenings of Pixar’s Coco. If you want to either catch the short or avoid it, the date you need to know for when this removal goes into effect is December 8.
While it has become customary for Pixar films to have a short film preceding them, that was usually produced by Pixar and only ran a few minutes. It served as an appetizer for the feature to come. (It also served as a place for Pixar to try out a new director before assigning them a full feature-length project.)
But Olaf’s Frozen Adventure is neither short nor produced by Pixar. Instead the short is a twenty-one minute long commercial from Disney, a reminder that they are working on a sequel to Frozen which will be hitting theaters two years from now.
With the overall run time of screenings now shaved slimmer by 21 minutes, Disney has requested that theaters use that time to insert another run of the film into their schedules. And that will certainly help the studio’s overall box office take. Entering into it’s second week of release, Coco is being forecasted to add an additional $26.1 million this weekend to its domestic box office take, raising its total to $108.7 million.
I have to think that the studio was aware that the short could possibly be poorly received. Many critics have noted that it was not included as part of the press screenings for Coco, when it is standard practice for the Pixar shorts to be included.
