[ad_1]
Movie theater owners can take a cue from Riley, the protagonist of Inside Out 2, and quell their anxiety. The Pixar film massively outperformed expectations at the box office and scored the biggest opening of the year so far with $155 million domestically and $140 million overseas, outpacing earlier 2024 blockbusters like Dune: Part 2. Industry prognosticators, still reeling from the historically bad Memorial Day Weekend box office, expected the animated movie to make just $80 million its opening weekend.
[khbrknews-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
The movie’s success is great news for Pixar and Hollywood. Pixar has been suffering a creative and commercial slump the past few years. And just one year after the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the 2024 box office has been off to a grim start, with high hopes dashed (see: The Fall Guy, Furiosa) and too much pressure placed on individual titles, like the recent Bad Boys sequel, to save the entire season. Had Inside Out 2 failed—a determination increasingly made as quickly as opening weekend comes and goes—Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter recently admitted to TIME that the studio would have to “radically” rethink its business model.
“I can’t imagine having a better chance at a big box office than this because it’s a known movie and characters that meant something to people and a really funny cast—and hopefully something meaty at the heart of it that you can take home as well,” he said in an interview. “So if this doesn’t do well at the theater, I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.”
Pixar plans to keep the movie in theaters for 100 days, a long runway that will help boost its numbers and combat the notion that families can wait just a couple weeks for a big budget film to land on streaming (see, again, The Fall Guy). It won’t face serious competition until Despicable Me 4 debuts July 3, and the pickings for family movies remain slim after that…
[ad_2]
