Inside Out 2's Box Office Success: A Few More Thoughts

Inside Out 2's performance at the box office continues to be sensational. Just the past week saw the film surpass two more milestones--the movie breaking the $600 million barrier domestically, and the $1.5 billion barrier globally, which, even if we adjust for inflation, makes it the highest-grossing film Hollywood has had since Avatar 2 way back in December 2022 (which was also a far more expensive movie than this animated feature). Meanwhile in getting to its domestic take of $613.4 million the film has already shown itself to not only have opened significantly bigger than the original Inside Out (again, even after inflation), but to have had longer legs (the opening weekend multiplier to the full gross already at 3.98, versus the prior film's 3.94)--this sequel with a bigger opener strictly speaking less front-loaded than its predecessor.

Even fairly late into its run, even as my old expectations about the film (that it would probably just touch the original Inside Out's current-dollar gross, rather than exceed its real-terms gross by perhaps a third) came to seem to belong to another, more pessimistic, age, I did not think the film would approach, let alone surpass, the $1.5 billion mark.

I have also found myself wondering at just why this has been the case--because the more in as the first Inside Out came out almost a decade ago and was not the biggest of Pixar's hits, with what that implies about the eagerness of the audience for a follow-up, and because if the critics are on the whole favorable to the film, they have been less enraptured with the film than one might expect in a way that may count for something. (The view that the movie is a mediocrity testifying to a continued Pixar slump artistically if not commercially not at all hard to find, and this seems to me to matter rather more than the critical slights of the hugely successful Super Mario Bros. film last year.)

I suppose that the paucity of material exciting the family film audience these past few years has helped--Elemental's eventual box office success pretty marginal, Wish one of the biggest flops of the year, while there has not been much else since, with Despicable Me 4 rather less of a success than its predecessors (certainly in real terms, certainly globally). Their weakness has been Inside Out 2's strength--though of course, the "why" does not diminish the very strong possibility that, even if the Deadline review of the movie was not particularly flattering, this movie will win 2024's Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbusters Tournament.