The June 2024 Box Office

Inside Out 2 is, at this point, a confirmed hit, breaking as it did the billion-dollar barrier as it topped both the domestic and international grosses of the original not only in current dollar but real terms.* Hollywood, which was desperate to see this movie be a hit (as a signal that big franchise movies are still salable and the human refuse in Tinseltown's executive suites have an excuse to go on greenlighting sequels no one asked for), is of course completely ecstatic--so much so that amid the ecstasies one might easily overlook the larger picture. After all, even a hit this big cannot save the industry, its year, or even its month--with the result that, as Furiosa proved a flop, and Bad Boys 4 failed even to match the merely middling gross of Bad Boys 3, even Inside Out 2's mighty performance left June 2024 a lower-grossing month for Hollywood than June 2023, which was itself no prize. With Fast X and The Little Mermaid sputtering out well below expectations, Elemental opening disappointingly, the latest Transformers installment continuing rather than bucking that franchise's downward trajectory, and Indiana Jones and The Flash proving themselves two of the three biggest flops of the year, June 2023 saw the box office collect just 70 percent of the 2015-2019 norm in real terms (calculated in June 2024 dollars). June 2024 saw less revenue than that, failing to break the billion-dollar barrier the way the box office did a year before (with some $966 million collected, as against June 2023's $1.004 billion). Adjusted for inflation this works out to just 93 percent of what June 2023 did in box office revenue, and a mere 65 percent of what would have been expected for the month of June in the years before the pandemic.

The result is that Inside Out 2's success is just part of a more complex picture, however much Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press may prefer to think otherwise.

* The original Inside Out made a bit over $850 million, some $1.13 billion in today's currency. The new film has made over $1.25 billion thus far, and counting, with a domestic gross of nearly $550 million in the till (versus the original's $470 million) and an international one of $720 million (versus that one's $660 million).