What Will Inside Out 2 Make at the Box Office?

Ordinarily when I think about what a movie might make I look at comparable, prior, films. If the movie is part of a series I look at its predecessors in the same series. If movies not in the same series offer some point of comparison, I use that. (Thus did I, when thinking about Indiana Jones 5, consider what preceding Indiana Jones films made--but also how Solo did, which, alas, turned out to be far more relevant.) And so on.

It seems to me that Disney-Pixar's upcoming Inside Out 2 does not have many convenient points of comparison as the first sequel to a film put out way back in 2015. Certainly there have been other Pixar movies accorded wide theatrical releases since the pandemic's disruption of the business but the circumstances of their releases differed sufficiently to complicate the drawing of any analogy. In the summer of 2022 Lightyear appeared at a point at which there had been sufficient recovery of theatergoing for there to be reasonable hopes of a "normal" Pixar gross, but if the movie was connected with the hit Toy Story series, it was awkwardly so given its conception as a prequel about one of the characters (Lightyear a "Toy Story Story" as Solo was a "Star Wars Story"), the change of the actor voicing the lead character, the significant shift in tone--and the way in which it became an object of the culture war. Last summer's Elemental was an original film, and I think a bit "concept-heavy" in that way that works against such films being wide-audience hits, especially in the American market, so that again it has its limits as a point of comparison. Meanwhile, even looking beyond Pixar's releases to Disney's wider releases leaves us without much more given the movies it has put out (like Wish).

Still, I can think of at least one way of approaching the matter, which is to look at the closest thing to a recently productive brand like Pixar in the Disney media universe, namely the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Prior to the catastrophe that was Captain Marvel 2 the MCU movies were in real, inflation-adjusted terms making 50-80 percent of what the preceding film in the same series made (Thor 4 as against Thor 3, etc., all the way through last summer's Guardians of the Galaxy 3). Especially given the fact that North American moviegoing pretty much fell by half between 2015 and 2023-2024 this number can seem significant--and thus worth applying to Inside Out 2.

The starting point is then the gross of the first Inside Out. That movie made $356 million at the U.S. box office. Adjusted for inflation using the good old Consumer Price Index this comes to about $468 million. Some 50-80 percent of that would work out to $240-$370 million. Assuming, not unreasonably given that China was not too big a contributor to the first film, that the domestic/international balance for the sequel is the same as it was for the original this would work out to a box office range of $600-$900 million at the global level.

How does this compare with Boxoffice Pro's expectations for the opening? According to their last long-range forecast one might anticipate $80-$110 million for the debut. As it happened the first Inside Out managed to quadruple its opening over its longer run. Might this one do the same? As a brand-name sequel one can expect the run of Inside Out 2 to be more front-loaded than the first film, but at the same time it seems to me that, plausibly testifying to the moviegoing audience's greater hesitancy about the trip to the theater, on the whole film grosses may be becoming less front-loaded than before--a larger part of the public, perhaps, waiting to hear what the film is really like before checking it out for themselves.

Returning to the example of the MCU I remember how the Disney-backed "first big release" of last summer--Guardians of the Galaxy 3--did, tripling its opening weekend gross. That would give us $240-$330 million, a range with a bottom end precisely equal to the bottom end of the range I suggested above, with an upper end safely inside the range as well. The movie quadrupling its money as the first film did would work out to a gross of $320-$440 million--largely inside the range, if breaking past it at the high end. Together this comes to a domestic range of $240-$440 million at the extreme ends, and globally, $600 million to $1.1 billion.

That said I can easily see the movie making $600 million--that figure just a little better than Elemental (and the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid) managed last summer, after all. However, the $1 billion+ gross, which far exceeds anything made by any movie since last July (when we got Barbie), would really be an achievement--more than I think plausible given the state of the market, and the strength of the preceding film, and the tripling of at least a decent open weekend rather than quadrupling it the more likely outcome. The result is that the $600-$850 million range seems to me the plausible territory for this movie--which, I am sure, would have the press crowing about a hit if the movie does indeed pull it off.