Why Hollywood Needs Inside Out 2 to be a Hit

Back in 2015 Inside Out hit theaters, and grossed over $850 million globally--which in today's terms works out to over $1.1 billion.

This sounds colossal--but really it was just a respectable performance by the standards of Disney-Pixar at the time, a good number of other films that studio released over the decade actually doing considerably better (like Frozen, as well as the sequels to that movie, and to the well-loved Finding Nemo and The Incredibles).

Yet in 2024 it seems the entertainment press is looking to Inside Out 2 for salvation--understandably, as the film is supposed to be the first really big release of a summer box office season very slow to get going amid the near-year-long drought since Barbie and Oppenheimer did their bit to prop up the sagging box office.

However, there is also what is less likely to be spoken, namely that Hollywood, amid its present crisis, not only wants a hit, but a hit of the same old kind it was used to scoring--a hit with a sequel attached to an established brand name of the sort that proved so elusive last year, and so far this year. A hit that will confirm the studio bosses in what they so obviously want to believe, that they can keep cranking out such sequels to established franchises and getting the ticket-buyer's money in return. That indeed they only need to go on doing what they were doing before, if perhaps with "better writers" and more "adults in the room" supervision of those floopy-brained creatives. That it is even the case that Hollywood's franchises are "underexploited" and the studios can and should actually exploit them more vigorously.

Will Hollywood get what it is hoping for with Inside Out 2? It seems possible. But it is also the case that, in profound denial over a structural crisis of the American film business as its model of filmmaking fails and moviegoing collapses, it is inclined to grasp at straws; to make modest successes sound like hits, and disappointments sound delightful. The result is that I am expectant of a good deal of spin whatever the outcome as the Suits go on doing what they have been doing in spite of its losing money because, hey, that beats actually working for their obscenely inflated salaries by figuring out how to get their industry out of the corner into which they themselves have been pushing it for decades.