UPDATE 12/4/2017: Disney has ordered movie theaters to stop playing the 21-minute short film Olaf’s Frozen Adventure before screenings of Pixar’s box office hit Coco, Mashable reports. An unnamed source confirmed to the tech website that the Frozen short will be pulled from cinemas beginning December 8. It’s hoped that enough time would be freed up so that theaters can add an additional showing of Coco to their daily schedule.
Did your Thanksgiving dinner run out of sides before you were completely full? Did your tias clown on your lack of a significant other for eight straight hours on Thursday? No matter how angry you got this holiday weekend, we can guarantee that you weren’t as mad as the people who went to see Coco in its record-breaking first weekend, only to have to power through a 21-minute Frozen short film.
The clip, titled Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, goes on longer than the traditional previews that normally roll out before movies (although, those were also present before Coco), and had people angrily tweeting their disgust over delaying the start of the feature presentation. It got so bad that Slate published a piece that detailed just how late you could get to the theater for Coco without missing a single second of the actual movie you paid to see (37 minutes, give or take).
It’s important to note that all Pixar movies–at least since A Bug’s Life–are preceded by a studio-created short, so the fact that there was something before Coco is not newsworthy in and of itself. The problem is that most of the shorts are significantly shorter; before Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, the longest pre-movie shorts were around 7 minutes.
To add to the problem, Frozen is about a bunch of white people, and Coco is a film focusing on Mexico and Dia de Muertos culture, so a vast majority of the tweets clowning on the short film were from Latinx folks calling white supremacy on Disney/Pixar; there’s even an online petition going around saying the same. Whether those claims are facetious or not, there’s something to be said about the ever-enduring marketing power thrown behind Frozen, a movie that is now four years old. Will Coco get the same treatment? Only time will tell.
One thing that is clear is that this reaction could have been expected; the Frozen short had been playing in front of Coco in Mexico since its release last month, and fans were so mad at it that Cinemex–one of Mexico’s movie theater chains–announced that it would play Coco without the short ahead of it. Maybe that will happen in the United States as more people complain, although the short is meant to get excited for Frozen 2, so it’s unlikely that it will go away entirely.
In the meantime, however, people going to see Coco had plenty of time to workshop their angry tweets while Olaf’s Frozen Adventure played, and they did not disappoint with their rage:
At least one user looked on the bright side of the whole debacle: