Inside Out 2 Passes Frozen, 3rd Highest-Grossing Animated Film

Inside Out 2 looks to leapfrog The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Inside Out 2 is now the third-highest grossing animated film ever after passing Frozen at the box office. Pixar’s latest has brought in $1.3 billion worldwide. It’s tipped over the beloved Disney musical and now has its sights set on The Super Mario Bros. Movie from last year next. (That’s going to be a wild task because the Illumination feature raked in $1.36 billion worldwide.) Still, if any movie has a chance at possibly topping Frozen II someday, it’s Inside Out 2. The Pixar sequel has become nothing short of a phenomenon at the box office. Despite numerous weeks with strong releases, Inside Out 2 has held strong. (On the way, both this film and Bad Boys: Ride or Die have helped rally the tide in theaters as well.)

Over at Disney, optimism is understandable because Inside Out 2 has it open in certain markets yet. In particular Japan gets their big opening day for the Pixar sequel soon. Disney believes there could be some real wins on the table there win the movie finally premieres. Another bright spot is the fact that some Zoomer audiences are going to re-watch inside out to multiple times. (That’s the only way some of these movies end up grossing more than $1 billion, someone’s got to be seeing it more than once.) In a sly observation, we could be looking at the first Gen Z nostalgia hit of this cycle. So, batten down the hatches for next year, when Zootopia 2 hits theaters. All in all, you have to believe that Inside Out 2 is a roaring success for Pixar that should give them more momentum headed into 2025.

Inside Out 2 Has Been A Huge W For Pixar

Inside Out 2 has been a win, but there was a lot of nervousness around this film, headed into release. It seems like speculation and concern was growing around the Pixar brand with some of the recent releases. A lot of the studios output ended up on Disney+ as the pandemic got started in 2020. Only recently, has Disney made the decision to go back towards the actual releases for these big animated projects. Because of relentless media coverage, public sentiment started to form around the studio’s place in the theater landscape. Those concerns are largely history now after Inside Out 2 managed to blow the door off of movie houses.

Pixar studio’s chief Pete Docter knew what this movie could be. In an interview with EW, Docter said that original storytelling is still a key tenet of their work. Just because Inside Out 2 ended up being a massive hit like this doesn’t mean they’re going completely with sequels from here on out. Sure, they will be familiar faces, but also balanced out with original stories that families can really sync their teeth into.

“One thing that I think was maybe slightly misinterpreted was the idea that we have to deliver more of what people know and maybe lean away from the personal. All of that’s true to some degree, but I think what we’re always trying to do is find what are the universal things that everybody believes, both in terms of concepts and in terms of life experience,” Docter argued. “So, for example, I thought [as a kid] my toys came to life. I thought there were monsters that lived in the closet. We’re looking for those kinds of big, universal things that people go, ‘I already know that it’s an original idea, but it’s a concept that I had, too.’ So it’s kind of a sequel in that way. You know what I mean? There’s a limited number of those, so they each have to be done in a very unique way through a specific lens. We want to hold onto that, but we want to make sure that they speak widely.”

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