Credit: PixarIt’s official: Inside Out 2 (2024) is Pixar’s biggest hit in years – and it can thank its diverse audience for that fact.
Pixar Animation Studios has infamously not had the best run lately. After a string of films released directly to Disney+ during peak COVID-19, the studio’s first big theatrical release in a post-pandemic world, Lightyear (2022), proved to be its biggest bomb to date.
Taking home just $226.4 million on a $200 million budget, its box office performance was, quite literally, lightyears away from the numbers pulled in by the Toy Story franchise that inspired its existence in the first place. Pixar Animation subsequently carried out mass layoffs in 2023, with Lightyear director Angus MacLane among those removed from the studio.
While last year’s Elemental (2023) proved to be a sleeper hit for the studio, there was still a lot of pressure on this year’s release. Inside Out 2 – the follow-up to Inside Out (2015) – was first announced in 2022, with some concerned that it would struggle to meet the lofty expectations set by its predecessor.
Fortunately, Inside Out 2 is a triumph. A week after its release, it’s already doubled its budget at the box office and nailed a 91% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film follows the same protagonist as before, Riley (Kensington Tallman), who has just turned 13 and is flooded with a new set of emotions at the onset of puberty. Among these is Anxiety (Maya Hawke), whose efforts to make Riley successful and popular see her exile other necessary emotions such as Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith).
For critics, one of its strongest suits is its universality. Themes such as puberty and anxiety are relatable to all viewers at some point in their lives – something Pixar was clearly banking on to pull in as large an audience as possible.
If the latest numbers are accurate, they succeeded in their goal. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the audience for Inside Out 2 was incredibly diverse by Pixar’s standards. While historically, white moviegoers have made up 40 to 50% of a Pixar movie’s domestic audience, this number dropped to 34% for Inside Out 2.
At the same time, the numbers have soared for other demographics. As per a PostTrak real-time survey, Latinos reportedly made up 38% of the audience, while Black moviegoers made up 13%, Asian moviegoers 10%, and Native American/other 5%.
A source allegedly told The Hollywood Reporter that Inside Out 2 “never would have done the kinds of numbers it did without that level of diversity.”
Much has been made about Disney’s focus on diverse storytelling in recent years. Earlier in 2024, Disney CEO Bob Iger admitted that movies don’t work if they’re too focused on messaging instead of entertainment and that some recent releases had indeed prioritized their messages above all else. “Look, we’re trying to reach a very, very diverse audience,” he said. “And we just have to be more sensitive to the interest of a broad audience.”
With that in mind, Pixar is reportedly set to stop focusing on producing more personal tales – such as the likes of Turning Red (2022) and Soul (2020) – and instead pivot back to letting personal experiences inform more universally appealing stories.
“What I’ve found is sometimes, if you are telling a personal story, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, no, that’s not the way the story goes. Because my story is this,'” Pete Docter, Chief Creative Officer of Pixar, told TIME. “But we’re not telling my story; we’re telling a story that needs to work for a fictional character that we’re creating. So there’s sometimes a reluctance to let go or let the movie shape itself the way it needs to.”
What are your thoughts on Inside Out 2?