Pixar is one of those companies for whom even bad news gets spun a little nice.

Consider the NY Times’ look at the company today. The Times is, as always, a serious paper with serious reporters, and Brooks Barnes should be given credit for taking on the subject, which is that some higher-ups at Disney are finally beginning to take a look at Pixar’s ever-declining box office figures.

(See Hitsville’s earlier “Is the Pixar Brand failing?”)

And the story goes deeper than I had imagined, noting that, Cars excepted, the company has been really lagging on the toy merchandising front.

(Cars, incredibly, produced $3 billion in toy sales. Ratatouille and Wall-E? Not so much.)

But the cumulative effects are now showing themselves:

Some industry watchers, a few of them still griping about the hefty $7.4 billion that Disney paid for Pixar in 2006, are fretting about the [forthcoming Up’s] commercial potential, particularly when it comes to benefiting other Disney businesses.

Richard Greenfield of Pali Research downgraded Disney shares to sell last month, citing a poor outlook for “Up” as a reason.

That’s all fine, but check out how Pixar’s box office gets described:

Adjusted for inflation, Pixar’s films have generated a combined $2.65 billion at North American theaters, a spectacular showing. “Finding Nemo” in 2003 was the high point, selling $405.6 million in tickets.

Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.”

Emphasis added. In the second paragraph, he’s talking about a single metric, the popularity of a Pixar film, as if it has two separate parts. The figures he’s citing are corrected for inflation, so they by definition contain the evidence of the falling attendance, right?

(Inside a studio, there are two metrics; how much money the film made, and how much profit the company made on it. But that’s not the distinction here.*)

I don’t understand why the NY Times and other papers don’t have a single consistent standard for talking about box office figures. There’s a simple one available: Attendance, which can be simply calculated from box office and average ticket prices, with a little tweaking for kids films, which of course average a little bit less.

Absent that, what gets made opaque is the real bad news for Pixar. Here’s how I calculated it a few months ago, emphasis added:

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I haven’t seen any discussion of how Pixar’s formidable box office muscles have been weakening. I’m not buying into the money-equals-quality equation, here; the excellence of the films is a different matter. While no one was looking Pixar became a massively successful company seemingly run entirely by artists. And the company’s probably never going to lose money on a movie.

Still: Wall-E is the fourth film in a row that has brought Pixar’s per-film average down.

For Finding Nemo, Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc., Pixar averaged a $350 million North American gross, adjusted for inflation. The company’ last four films have averaged $250 million; its last three films $235 million, and last two films $217 million.

Pixar makes a lot of money overseas and from toys; and there hasn’t been a Shrek-sized animated hit in a while from any studio.

But Wall-E’s tepid box office ($223 million, just above Ratatouille’s $212 million) is pretty portentous as it moves forward under the Disney aegis.

The $3 billion in Cars toy sales answers the question of why there will be a Cars sequel, which nobody in the world is clamoring for. That and Toy Story 3, another concession to the bottom line, probably represent the company’s short-term battle plan.

If it doesn’t have a long-term one, sooner or later Disney is going to put the screws to Pixar. When that happens I predict we’ll see a recycling of the same stories we saw about the Weinstein and Disney, or New Line and Time Warner … heavy on sympathies to the victimized artistes, light on the reality that the artists gave up their autonomy when they sold themselves to the big bad wolf for $7.4 billion.

* In the story, Barnes writes:

The budget for “Up” is about $175 million excluding marketing, on par with other Pixar titles.

Box Office Mojo, however, says that Finding Nemo, by contrast, cost $94 million just six years ago. The disparity in budgets and appeal overseas means that, in strict dollar terms, Pixar made about one tenth as much profit on Wall-E as it did on Nemo.