Kids’ movies are turning the 2024 box office Inside Out

INT. OFFICE BLOCK —  NIGHT

A boardroom, cluttered with empty coffee cups and packed with stressed Hollywood execs scowling at each other and generally looking pretty lost. We see a flipboard with the words “Avatar", “superheroes”, “Barbenheimer”, “franchisable IP”, and “Chalamet” all crossed out, a single red question mark underlined several times is scrawled beneath…

Up until very recently, the 2024 box office had been taking a beating. The year got off to a slow start as January and February lived up to their reputation as “dump months”; Garfuriosa was a Memorial Day weekend washout; and Dune 2, which took just over $700 million all told, looked relatively unchallenged as the year’s top grosser, much to the chagrin of its director.

Compared to the first half of 2023, when there were flashy new installments from the Fast and Furious factory’s never-ending production line, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series, and the world of Super Mario, the first 6 months of the year didn’t convince enough American moviegoers to switch off the endless stream of at-home content and get out to their local theaters.

But then things started to get emotional.

On June 14th, Pixar released the follow up to its critically acclaimed 2015 effort Inside Out, an animated adventure set almost exclusively within the confines of an 11-year-old girl’s brain as her emotions take over. Despite Pixar’s recent stumbles, the long-awaited sequel was tipped to be the biggest opening of the year with a projected $80-90 million haul. However, the movie outstripped even the most optimistic expectations and took $155 million in its first weekend, making it the best opening since Barbie last July.

The Inside Out 2 hype train hasn’t really slowed since either. It became the fastest animated movie in history to cross the $1 billion threshold at the global box office, before going on to become the highest grossing Pixar film ever, and the 4th biggest animated movie of all time. Indeed, when compared to the other $1 billion+ animations like Frozen or Finding Dory, IO2 continues to pace ahead of its competition, having taken ~$545 million in its first 26 days at the domestic box office.

Overjoyed

Like Riley, the now 13-year-old protagonist who welcomes a host of new feelings to her headspace in Inside Out 2, Pixar execs will likely be experiencing a heady cocktail of emotions such as joy, shock, and perhaps a little relief at how their latest movie has landed. The film interrupts a flurry of critical and commercial underperformers, like Lightyear and Elemental, that the Disney-owned studio’s put out since the pandemic.

As our Sherwood colleague Walt Hickey observed, “it’s generally a profitable notion to release animated films intended for families, especially during the summer months when kids are off from school”, rather than giving them a limited theater run, palming them straight off to streamers, or scrapping them altogether for tax purposes.

That notion was supported further by Despicable Me 4, the 6th overall installment in the Minion Cinematic Universe, which took $122 million over the July 4th holiday period — an entry that is already being touted in tandem with Inside Out 2 as “saving the summer” for the movie biz.

Family favorites

Cinema owners have been crying out for something besides Dune 2 to pique the interests of the American movie-going public for months now, after a string of flops — even by the tempered “New Normal” standards — in 2024. It was a rough start to the year for the US box office, with the Hollywood Reporter noting that takings in the first month were the lowest they’d been in January for over 25 years (excluding the pandemic era). The $364 million total in February was even worse.

June’s $966 million tally, on the other hand, is one of the highest monthly gross figures the domestic box office has seen in the post-pandemic world, and July could be on course to continue the hot streak thanks to the 2 family-friendly animations currently dominating the charts (not to mention the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine).

Well-made animations have proven to be a tried and tested method of getting adults to splash out on tickets for themselves and their children, with the most successful examples often tapping into the “four quadrant” model, offering subtler jokes or more mature themes for older watchers alongside typically kid-friendly content.

Circling back

But, while Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 might be helping to reinvigorate the summer box office, neither movie does much to counter the criticism that’s been plaguing the industry for years: Hollywood is running low on original ideas. Indeed, many of the most popular movies every year are now follow-ups, prequels, and part 2s, 3s, 4s, etc.

While checking back in on a beloved set of characters has, of course, been a rich content seam that movie makers have mined for decades, sequels only really started to dominate in the last 15 years.

On average, from 2019 to 2024, roughly 50% of the top 10 grossing movies of each year contained a number, numeral, or “:” that clearly denoted that the film was part of a series. That’s up from just over 10% in the latter half of the 1990s, when only 7 titles contained the symbols that we’ve come to associate with Hollywood cashing in with second, third, and fourth parts. To put that into perspective, 8 of the top 10 highest grossing movies of 2024 so far have numbers or colons in them. Even the 2 exceptions to the pattern don’t ooze originality: there’s The Garfield Movie, the titular cat having been kicking around since the late 1970s, and yet another Planet of the Apes film.

For years, superhero movies were holding up the box office, as Marvel movie after Marvel movie broke record after record. But, with signs that audiences have started losing interest in the genre, perhaps the duty will fall to wholesome family-friendly animations to keep our silver screens alive. If so, you can be sure that any hint of success will undoubtedly birth a “franchise” and a decades-spanning series of movies… still, Shrek 5 is something to get excited about.