How Pixar rescued Hoppers from obscurity with a viral moment and why the hard part remains

Pixar's Hoppers opens March 6. On January 3, only 28% of audiences had heard of it - a dangerous number for a studio that once made theatrical animation feel like a cultural inevitability. Nine weeks out from release, a $150M original animated film was essentially invisible.

What followed was one of the more instructive marketing recoveries in recent memory, driven not by a traditional campaign but by a cartoon lizard pressing a phone button in a post-credits scene that almost nobody watched.

According to Greenlight Analytics' TheQuorum, awareness climbed from a score of 29 on January 3 to 48 by February 25, right in line with the average for a film of this scale at this distance from release. The data tells a story of a campaign that worked. It also tells a story of a problem that hasn't been solved yet.

To understand why Hoppers' awareness crisis mattered, you have to understand what Pixar originals have been up against since the pandemic.

The studio's post-COVID theatrical record with non-franchise films is brutal: Lightyear opened to $50.5M and was considered a flop against its $200M budget. Elemental debuted to $29.6M, the second-lowest opening in Pixar history, behind only the original Toy Story in 1995. Elio fell further still, opening to just $20.8M. The last original Pixar film to cross $500M worldwide was Coco in 2017.

The cause isn't hard to identify. During the pandemic, Disney routed Pixar films (e.g. Soul, Luca, Turning Red) directly to Disney+, training a generation of family audiences to expect Pixar at home. When the studio returned to theaters, the conditioning stuck. Audiences weren't hostile to Pixar; they just no longer felt a theatrical urgency around it.

Sequels have told a different story: Inside Out 2 opened to $154M domestically and went on to become the highest-grossing Pixar film of all time at $1.69B globally. But originals have no built-in audience, no pre-existing emotional attachment, no franchise scaffolding. Every awareness point has to be earned from scratch.

That context is what made Hoppers' January tracking so alarming and what made what happened next so worth examining.

In June 2025, Pixar buried a short teaser for Hoppers in the post-credits of Elio, a film that, by the studio's own implicit admission, almost no one saw. The clip is simple: a small green lizard sits with a phone, repeatedly pressing the lizard emoji 🦎. Each press triggers a robotic voice: "lizard... lizard... lizard." He speeds up, pauses, goes cross-eyed, hits it one more time. Cut to the Hoppers logo.

That was it. No plot. No stars. No title card explaining what Hoppers even was.

Audiences recorded the clip and posted it. By July 27, a green-screen template featuring the lizard had generated over 78,000 TikTok videos. Creators used it to represent spamming, repetitive tasks, and the last functioning brain cell on a Friday afternoon. A mashup with "Like A G6" hit 12 million views. Versions set to Eminem's "Rap God," Cardi B's "WAP," and AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" each pulled millions more. An EDM performer in Denver dropped the audio mid-set. The lizard had no name, no movie, no context…just a format so simple and relatable it required nothing.

Pixar's response was the right one: don't explain it, just name him. The studio posted the clip to its official accounts with a single line: "his name is Tom." Then they got to work building on what they hadn't planned.

The Tom-as-marketer execution was clever in its specificity. Rather than simply reposting the original clip, Pixar redeployed his signature behavior (the phone-tapping in a new context). When press screenings generated early positive reactions, a TV spot showed Tom liking the individual posts one by one, using his now-iconic frantic tapping. The format audiences already loved became the delivery mechanism for social proof. It wasn't just content about the film; it was content in the voice of the film's breakout character, doing what that character does.

Tom then crossed into physical space. He appeared in character at ESPN's live broadcast of First Take in San Francisco, wandering the park, waving at fans, holding signs that read "My name is Tom Lizard" and "Has anyone seen Jon Hamm?" He was visible in the background of the broadcast a planned but apparently spontaneous cameo. Director Daniel Chong later revealed that at early audience test screenings, when asked to name their favorite character, crowds yelled Tom…a supporting character with minimal screen time who they'd never actually seen in the film. The meme had preceded the movie, and audiences had already formed an attachment.

The Super Bowl spot in early February confirmed the campaign's mainstream ambitions. TheQuorum recorded a four-point awareness jump between the February 4 and February 11 surveys, direct confirmation that the traditional broadcast placement did exactly what it was supposed to do, lifting the floor for audiences the organic campaign hadn't reached.

By February 25, Hoppers' awareness score had climbed to 48 - an average for a film of this scale at this stage. On paper, the campaign worked. The problem is that awareness was never really the existential issue. Theatrical intent is.

TheQuorum's data shows that only 39% of audiences who are interested in Hoppers plan to see it in theaters. Compare that to 54% for Toy Story 5, 49% for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, and 44% for Minions & Monsters. Those films carry franchise gravity that pulls audiences toward the big screen as a matter of instinct. Hoppers doesn't have that. It has Tom.

However, exposure on social platforms is not the same as purchase intent, and purchase intent is not the same as showing up on a Friday night. The gap between "I've heard of this" and "I'm buying tickets" is where Pixar's streaming conditioning problem lives, and no amount of Tom content fully bridges it. What bridges it is word of mouth. Early reactions to Hoppers have been strongly positive/ If those reactions translate to the general audience that shows up opening weekend, the multiplier effect could be significant. A film that opens modestly but holds well is a film that eventually earns the cultural conversation it needs to sustain itself.

The marketing got Hoppers from invisible to visible. Whether audiences decide that visible is worth a trip to the theater is a question that no campaign, however creative, can fully answer in advance.

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