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Credit: PixarPixar has officially saved Disney: Inside Out 2 has cracked the billion-dollar mark that all major studios salivate over. However, this is also terrible news for the future of animated storytelling.
The Walt Disney Company has had a rough half-decade or so. Years of sustained success by Marvel Studios, Disney Animation, Lucasfilm, and Pixar put the Mouse House on a level of global dominance that has arguably never been seen; box office numbers were huge, theme park attendance (and prices) was skyrocketing, and the good times would never end.
Then COVID-19 arrived, superhero fatigue set in (no matter what Bob Iger thinks), and flop after flop hit the theaters. In the last two years, pretty much every arm of the vast Disney machine saw high-profile failures, like The Marvels (2023), Wish (2023), and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023), with one major exception: Pixar Animation Studios.
Pixar released one of 2023’s surprise hits with Elemental. The film opened below financial projections but became a sleeper hit after the studio allowed it to remain in theaters for more than a few weeks. It ended up grossing almost $500 million, ultimately becoming one of the Disney family’s more successful movies of the year.
Related: Disney Faces Backlash After Pixar Animation Studios Declared Dead
Now, Pixar’s latest release, Inside Out 2, has blown that out of the water. The sequel to the beloved Inside Out (2015) has grossed an estimated $1,014,806,043 (as of publication time, per Box Office Mojo) in 19 days. That is a record for an animated movie, though it comes nowhere near Avengers: Endgame (2019) cracking a billion in a staggering five days. It is now one of only 11 animated movies to break that momentous number.
Inside Out 2 is racking up a whole brace of milestones, including being the highest-grossing movie of 2024 so far (beating out Dune: Part 2), the first movie to make a billion since Barbie (2023), and the first Pixar or Disney animated film to gross over $500 million since 2019.
Unsurprisingly, movie industry figures are celebrating. Disney EVP of Theatrical Distribution Tony Chambers released a statement saying:
“We’re absolutely thrilled to have reached this phenomenal milestone in record time, and it once again proves that global audiences will come out for a great movie. The film’s remarkable success is a testament not only to the incredible creativity of the Pixar team but an example of moviegoing at its very best.”
National Association of Theatre Owners CEO Michael O’Leary released his own, saying:
“On behalf of movie theatre owners across the country and around the world, we want to congratulate Disney’s Inside Out 2 for grossing $1 billion faster than any animated movie in history. The film’s stunning global success once again illustrates that audiences the world over will respond to compelling, entertaining movies, and that they want to enjoy them on the big screen.”
While that is very nice of Mr. O’Leary to say, the massive success of Inside Out 2 is actually another potential coffin nail in “compelling, entertaining” storytelling, which is no shade to the Kelsey Mann-directed movie itself.
However, the billion-dollar gross of this Pixar film is certain to convince the powers that be at Disney that sequels are the only thing that can make money right now and further cement its turn away from personal storytelling and more toward generic “universal” stories.
Related: ‘Inside Out 3’ Is Already Completed, Coming Next Year, Pixar Chief Announces
Pixar chief Pete Docter has publicly admitted that the studio needs to change. According to him, that change means steering away from stories that have personal meaning to the people behind them and more into whatever most people want.
Bloomberg reports Docter describing the new strategy as that “the studio’s movies should be less a pursuit of any director’s catharsis and instead speak to a commonality of experience.” Pixar President Jim Morris has openly described Inside Out 2 as the test that will show whether the company will go all-in on sequels, saying, “With a sequel, if you put something out there that doesn’t have the goods, then you will be punished for it.
Having had the doldrums we did, it will certainly be a good test with Inside Out 2 for us to see: Does this stuff still work, or does it not?”
Now, the test is over. Sequels work at the box office. And that’s all we’re going to see for a long, long time.
Inside Out 2 will feature the voices of Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Diane Lane, and Kyle MacLachlan, with new actors Tony Hale, Liza Lapira, Maya Hawke, Ayo Edebiri, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Paul Walter Hauser, and Kensington Tallman joining the cast. It is directed by Kelsey Mann from a script by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein and a story by Mann and LeFauve.
Do you think Disney’s new sequel trilogy is a good or bad thing?