Box office: Inside Out 2 brings theatres (and Disney-Pixar) back to life

Also: Bad Boys has the 2nd-best second weekend of the year, and The Lord of the Rings cracks the top ten again.

L to R: Original emotions Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale), Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), and Disgust (Liza Lapira) meet new emotions Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Anxiety (Maya Hawke), and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

What a difference a year makes.

Last year at this time, Pixar’s Elemental had the lowest first-weekend gross of any film in the studio’s nearly 30-year history, even before adjusting for inflation.

Now, the studio has rebounded with Inside Out 2, which grossed an estimated $155 million in its first three days—which, if the estimates hold, would be…

• The 25th-best opening weekend of all time.

• The 5th-best opening weekend of the post-Covid era (behind three Marvel movies and Barbie).

• The 3rd-best opening weekend of any animated movie ever (behind Incredibles 2 and the photorealistic remake of The Lion King).

• More than any Disney or Pixar animated film has grossed domestically in its entirety this decade.¹

Inside Out 2 is already the 5th-highest-grossing movie of the year in North America, behind Dune 2, Godzilla x Kong, Kung Fu Panda 4, and Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes—and it will pass most if not all of those films by next week.

Meanwhile, Bad Boys: Ride or Die grossed an impressive $33 million this weekend—a drop of only 41.6% from its opening last week—and this gave it the 2nd-best second weekend of the year so far (behind Dune: Part Two).

As Tom Brueggeman notes at IndieWire, the combined (and unexpected) success of Bad Boys and Inside Out helped push total weekend grosses to $214 million, making this the first time weekend ticket sales have passed $200 million since July of last year, when Barbie and Oppenheimer were in their second week of release.

Also worth noting: Three movies passed the $100 million mark this weekend, all at very different speeds. Inside Out 2 got there in two days; Bad Boys: Ride or Die got there in ten days; and IF got there in its fifth week of release. That raises the number of films that have crossed the century mark this year to eight.

(By this time last year, there were ten such films, of which five had also grossed over $200 million, two had grossed over $300 million, and one—The Super Mario Bros. Movie—had grossed over $500 million. So far this year, Dune: Part Two is the only film that has grossed over $200 million, and no film has grossed $300 million.)

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: