The Star of the Season Is Here: And It Is a Lizard
Hoppers is out this week and the movie’s breakout star is all over your social media feed. Tom the Lizard was an icon before the first trailer for Hoppers dropped. It’s easy to see why. Our little green obsession rose to fame after being in a post-credits scene for Elio.
Tom sits in a dark room bathed In the glow of a smartphone. Once he presses the device in front of him, his eyes grow bigger and bigger and bigger as the draw of scrolling proves too much.. What once was a silly tag at the end of a charming animated film became a full on meme on the Internet.. People recording their phones at the put him on Tik Tok, and we were rolling. Folks kept asking in the comments, “What is this lizard from?”
Once the memes started flowing, it was already a phenomenon. Entertainment Weekly asked director Daniel Chong about how the breakout character came to be. “It was all these little steps that magically happened and made it to what it was,” Chong mentioned. “It’s hard to imagine you can replicate that.” It takes some good luck to craft an Internet sensation long before the movie actually came out. Hoppers managed to catch lightning in a bottle with Tom the Lizard. Check out some more details about how Tom crept into more and more of the film.
“We maybe just started throwing him in there just for variety ’cause he’s green and he’s small and just gives you a little bit of versatility in different ways,” Chong told EW. “And then suddenly he just took on a life of his own in the story and started having some of the best lines.”
Hoppers is the Tom the Lizard show
In that interview and elsewhere, Chong explained that Pixar was looking for something to add to the end of Elio. The concept of the silly little clip with Tom kept coming up and Disney’s marketing team decided to try it. The results kind of speak for themselves. According to Reuters, “the little lizard that could” has generated 316 million views across platforms. During Hoppers’ big Hollywood premiere, the outlet spoke to Pixar’s Pete Docter about unwittingly unleashing a meme. It’s a tough spot to be in. You want to market a movie. But, this approach is better because audiences sometimes don’t want to be marketed to.
“I don’t know that you can ever predict these things. As soon as you try to make something go viral, that’s like certain death,” Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter admitted. “We just thought it was funny. We thought this character is quirky and weird.”
Tom even has a skin in Fortnite
Because of all this viral press, the outlook for Hoppers is very rosy. Pixar thinks they’re headed for a 40 to $60 million opening weekend. And, all this matters more because of the perception that original films from the studio are lacking something. (Some of us would argue that the lingering effects of 2020 have a ton to do with that, as well as other lifestyle changes among theater-going audiences.) Yet and still, Pixar is feeling the love and a lot of that is due to Tom the Lizard stealing the show when it comes to marketing Hoppers.
How do you know all this hype is for real? Well, Tom getting his own Fortnite skin should be a good indication of how big a meme this is. There are cosmetics and of course a big green lizard suit for folks to run around the map with. It’s been very funny to see even more clips involving this strange little dude on social media feeds this week. Perhaps the funniest detail is that fans don’t even know where Tom came from. He’s just the silly little lizard from the Internet. And really, that’s a level of joy that we can all get behind right now.
(featured image: Pixar)
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