‘Elio’ ending and post-credits scenes explained

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Pixar’s Elio.

Elio has finally beamed into theaters.

The latest adventure from Disney and Pixar follows a lonely young boy named Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) as he journeys from an air force base into outer space in a search for purpose and friendship. As he tries to impress the intergalactic council known as the Communiverse, Elio is forced to negotiate peace between the alien congress and the warmongering villain Lord Grigon (Brad Garrett).

Along the way, Elio befriends Glordon, Grigon’s easygoing young son who cheerfully becomes a bargaining chip in an act of rebellion against his father. And all the while, a lookalike clone fills Elio’s shoes back home so that the Earthling’s aunt, Olga (Zoe Saldaña), doesn’t notice his absence.

The final stretch of Elio sends its young protagonist on a rescue mission to save Glordon and the Communiverse from the respective clutches of military researchers and Grigon’s army — on opposite sides of the universe. And there are a couple of extra treats for audiences who stay through the credits, too.

Here’s how the end of Elio plays out.

How does Elio end?

The last act of Elio sees the titular space traveler teleport back to Earth after unsuccessfully trying to dupe Grigon with a clone of Glordon. Elio reunites with Olga, and the duo teams up with the protagonist’s goopy clone to save the real Glordon, who inadvertently took a small spacecraft to Earth and was intercepted by Olga’s superiors in the military.

While the clone creates a diversion, Elio and Olga commandeer Glordon’s spaceship and dodge dangerous debris as they exit Earth’s orbit — with a little help from ham radio enthusiasts around the world, including Elio’s acquaintance Bryce (Young Dylan) and Olga’s colleague (Brendan Hunt).

Elio and Olga successfully return Glordon to Grigon, who resuscitates his son and tearfully embraces him at the Communiverse base. The intergalactic council then invites Elio to join them as a permanent ambassador to Earth, but he declines the offer so that he can give Earth another chance.

In the film’s last scene before the credits, the entire Communiverse base travels to Earth to bring Elio and Olga back home, inspiring awestruck wonder in all who witness it on the horizon.

Who’s that talking at the end of Elio?

In an unusual move for a Pixar movie, Elio ends with audio of a real-life figure — and one who doesn’t appear in the movie, at that.

As the Communiverse appears in the sky to return Elio and his aunt to their home planet, we hear Carl Sagan discussing the search for extraterrestrial life. “The search for life elsewhere is remarkable in our age because this is the first time that we can actually do something besides speculation,” Sagan says in an audio clip lifted from a 1985 interview with Studs Terkel of Chicago’s WFMT radio station.

Sagan, the famed astronomer who helped communicate wide-reaching scientific ideas to the general public through projects like Cosmos, was promoting his novel Contact when he gave the above quote. Elio director Domee Shi told Entertainment Weekly that Contact, which was later adapted into a film by Robert Zemeckis, served as a key inspiration for the Pixar project.

“We love the idea of space being hopeful, and that humanity’s answers could be out there somewhere,” the filmmaker said. “I just love how in Contact, they show aliens in such an aspirational and positive way, and not something really scary that’s coming to get us or coming to replace us.”

Does Elio have a post-credits scene?

Yes, if you stay through the first section of the credits of Elio, you’ll see a brief extra scene featuring the main character and his new friend, Bryce, as well as a second scene at the end of the credits that teases Pixar’s next movie. In the first scene, the two kids are sitting on the beach when they receive a message from a mysterious caller on their ham radio.

“Glordon, your disk is muted,” Elio says, indicating that his alien buddy hasn’t properly deployed his CommuniDisk — the futuristic device that serves as a universal translator and controls temperature and gravity.

“Oops, sorry,” Glordon says over the radio, apparently switching on his disk. “Tell me everything!”

Right as Elio opens his mouth to respond, the scene cuts, and the credits return.

There’s also another brief scene at the very end of the credits (even after the Disney and Pixar logos!) that teases Pixar’s next project, Hoppers.

How does Elio tease Hoppers?

After you sit through all of Elio‘s credits, you’ll see one final clip — but it’s not actually from Elio.

Instead, the final moment shows a lizard repeatedly smacking a touch screen, and we hear a robotic voice saying “Lizard. Lizard. Lizard.” over and over again. The scene reveals that the lizard has been obsessively pressing the lizard emoji icon, though it’s not clear why the reptile is texting, or how it crossed paths with a touchscreen in the first place. 

The film then cuts to the logo for Hoppers, advertising that the next Pixar film will hit theaters in March 2026.

The scene does little to help audiences understand anything about the plot or premise of Hoppers. However, Pixar’s top brass have previously revealed that the film follows a young human woman who jumps into the body of a synthetic beaver and embeds herself with the local beaver population to prevent the destruction of her local wetlands. (Basically Avatar with aquatic mammals instead of Na’vi.)

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Hoppers stars Piper Curda, Jon Hamm, and Bobby Moynihan. The film is currently scheduled to release in theaters on March 6, 2026.