Its downfall is that it came just before the rise of the Very Online generation. El Dorado is the perfect movie for the internet age. Watching it now, it’s obvious why it was a miss at the box office back in 2000.
The main complaints? That the story was too derivative, the animation too similar to the pantheon of Disney Renaissance movies that came before it, the audience too unclear, the movie too obviously chasing Disney glory. It might surprise some, then, to find that El Dorado bombed at the box office and was mostly panned by critics. The movie has transcended itself to become ground for fandom crossovers. It’s not just the easily packaged screenshots - diving into the El Dorado tag on Tumblr (last week, as its 20th anniversary approached, it crept up on the weekly Fandometrics buzz tracke r) reveals fan art of riffing on the film with other characters taking the roles of leads Tulio and Miguel, or with the two of them swapped into the roles of different beloved characters. Two decades after its release, the movie has an enduring internet legacy in the form of GIFs and memes.
The Road to El Dorado was ahead of its time.ĭreamWorks Animation’s third movie, made during the era when the studio was still finding its voice and purpose, is a buddy adventure in the style of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s “ Road to” movies.
