Inside Out 2 Continues To Crush At The Box Office With An Exceptional Second Weekend
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, single titles having $100 million weekends has become a rarity. In the time after theaters reopened domestically in 2021, only a little over a dozen movies have managed to earn nine figures in their first three days of release. Last weekend, director Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2 became the fifteenth, earning $154.2 million, but now the new Pixar title has done something that no other film has done since 2020: if early numbers hold firm, it will be the first to earn $100 million during its second Friday-to-Sunday.
What's even more amazing about the news is that Inside Out 2 isn't the only feature thriving right now. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
Inside Out 2 Has Just A 35 Percent Weekend-To-Weekend Drop As It Makes Another $100 Million
Prior to the arrival of Inside Out 2 in theaters, Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part 2 sat atop of the list of films with the biggest debuts in 2024, having made $82.5 million when it was first released back at the start of March. Today, per The Numbers, it can be said that the latest feature from Pixar has unequivocally had two of the biggest box office weekends this year, with the movie having added another $100 million to its domestic haul since Friday.
As you can probably guess, it hasn't taken long for Inside Out 2 to makes moves to the top of other box office rankings. The animated film has already surpassed the domestic theatrical earnings of Dune: Part Two (the sci-fi epic made $282.1 during its run, and the Inside Out sequel has made $355.2 million thus far). The summer release is still sitting behind the spring hit on the worldwide chart, having made $581.9 million thus far compared to Dune 2's $711.2 million... but an order change is inevitable.
Even in the larger context of Pixar movies (a history that goes back nearly 30 years), the success is phenomenal. Inside Out 2 is now just a little over $1 million short of surpassing domestic earnings of Pete Docter's Inside Out from 2015, which is Pixar's sixth biggest hit ever in the United States and Canada. After just a little over a week of playing on the big screen, it has made more globally than John Lasseter's Cars 2 ($560.2 million) and Pete Docter's Monsters, Inc ($560.5 million), and it has a good chance of becoming the animation studio's fifth billion-dollar earner (joining a club that includes Brad Bird's Incredibles 2, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4, Lee Unkrich's Toy Story 3, and Andrew Stanton's Finding Dory).
Smart release strategy has helped. Mark Dindal's The Garfield Movie has held strong since its underwhelming debut in late May, having made $85.1 million so far domestically, but families are looking for fun activities during the summer months, and Inside Out 2 is positioned as a prime attraction. As I noted in my box office column last week, things will slow down after the calendar flips over to July, as that's when Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage's Despicable Me 4 will be moving in to steal the attention of the blockbuster's core demographic, but it still has more than a full week to add to its coffers.
The real question now is: when are we getting Inside Out 3? Pixar has never been a studio known to not try and capitalize on a hit (let's remember that John Lasseter's Toy Story 2 was the company's third feature), and there is clearly an excitement and hunger from the movie-going audience for more emotion-centric stories. It will take a few years for the project to get made simply because of the length of the development pipeline for Pixar, but a second sequel feels inevitable.
Inside Out 2 Will Grab All The Headlines, But Bad Boys: Ride Or Die Continues To Quietly Succeed
Pretty much every box office-related headline you see this weekend will focus on the numbers for Inside Out 2, but that's leaving Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys: Ride Or Die to quietly establish itself as one of the bigger big screen box office stories of 2024. Because of a lacking overlap of key demographics, the ticket sales for the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence-led action film hasn't been detrimentally effected by the success of the latest feature from Pixar. Its first weekend-to-weekend drop was just 40 percent, and now that performance has been followed up by a slim 44 percent fall.
The third sequel in the Bad Boys franchise added $18.8 million to its domestic ticket sales this weekend, bringing its total in the region to $146.9 million. In a little over two weeks, it has climbed to sixth place on the domestic box office chart for 2024, having already out-earned Gil Kenan's Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and passed John Krasinski's IF (though as you can see from the chart, the imaginary friends movie is still making money).
The sequel still has a lot more tickets to sell if its going to catch up with what Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's Bad Boys For Life did back in 2020 (the long-awaited sequel having made $204.4 million domestically and $424.5 million globally), but the legs that the feature has demonstrated thus far suggests that is still on the table.
The action film wasn't cheap to make (per Variety, it was produced with a $100 million price tag), but at this point, everything the new release makes is profit. Bad Boys: Ride Or Die is the sixth biggest film of the year domestically and the tenth biggest film of the year worldwide, and it's likely it will continue to rise in the coming weeks.
This weekend, neither Jeff Nichols' The Bikeriders nor Joshua John Miller's The Exorcism did much to significantly shake things up at the box office, but will Kevin Costner's Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 and Michael Sarnoski's A Quiet Place: Day One perform differently? Be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend next Sunday to find out, and check out all of the films that are on their way to the big screen in the weeks and months ahead with out 2024 Movie Release Schedule.
