The Astonishing Staying Power of Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4

Initially making my prediction for Inside Out 2's gross I suggested the $600-$850 million range for where it would finish up. As I write the movie is approaching twice the high end of the range I predicted--$1.7 billion. This has partly been a matter of the movie's extraordinary domestic performance, the movie surpassing the $650 million mark over Labor Day weekend.

I did not make a prediction about Despicable Me 4 prior to its release, but after its fourth weekend I did have something to say of its gross--and contended that there was a good chance of the film's failing to reach the $800 million mark. A month later it surpassed the $900 million mark (and has now taken in $930 million, and counting).

Both movies proved "leggier" than I expected, even fairly late into their releases. Where the original Inside Out fell just short of its quadrupling its opening weekend gross domestically, the sequel, even with a far bigger opening, managed a bigger multiplier over its North American run (4.23 versus 3.94 as of September 8). Likewise where I thought Despicable Me 4 played out at about the $290 million mark it had hit in North America, and the $700 million or so it had made globally, it proved to have quite some more way to go with even better late run holds than Inside Out 2 managed (its weekend grosses falling just 22 percent in the weekend right after my comment, with the pattern more or less holding afterward, adding almost $70 million more to its take).

In fairness that works out to Inside Out 2 being a somewhat bigger hit than we might have expected even late in a run which made clear that it was a giant hit early on, and Despicable Me 4 not showing quite so much erosion of its gross as seemed the case a few weeks ago but still indicative of a downward trend in the now rather long-running franchise's fortunes (though not so much so that a Despicable Me 5 seems fairly plausible). Still, they have been remarkable performers, especially given the lowering of expectations that 2023 suggested for such movie--which I am still inclined to think is indicative of the bigger picture that the focus on just a few successes entails. After all, i these films have cleaned up that reflected the comparative weakness of the competition as pretty much everything else aimed at the same market performed rather poorly (from IF to the adaptation of Crockett Johnson's children's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon) in a generally thin summer, enabling the few strong prospects to "clean up" (just as Top Gun 2 did two summers ago). It will take more than that to evidentiate any really broad revival of moviegoing beyond the levels seen in the last three years, and I think that anyone arguing for that on the basis of the evidence would do well to wait and see how the rest of this year goes.