‘Inside Out 2’ Just Made Animation History!
On June 14, Disney and Pixar released their newest animated film and highly anticipated sequel, Inside Out 2. The film saw the return of Joy (Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Liza Lapira), and Fear (Tony Hale), the voices who live inside Riley’s head. We last saw them in 2015, when Riley was struggling to adjust to her new life in San Francisco.
Now, Riley is a teenager, and the emotions that helped her get through her childhood are about to get the shock of their lives.
In Inside Out 2, Riley is adjusting to becoming a teenager and the changes to her brain and body that happen when she hits puberty.
Those basic emotions were all she needed as a child, but as a teenager, there is a lot more going on. In addition to Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust, Inside Out 2 introduced Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and Nostalgia (June Squibb).
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Experts expected Inside Out 2 to reach around $100 million at the box office on its opening weekend. But the Disney/Pixar film surprised everyone and quickly shot to the top of the charts. In its opening weekend, the animated film made just shy of $300 million, nearly equally divided between the domestic and international box offices.
And now, Inside Out 2 has officially broken records.
According to reports, the movie made $100 million during its second weekend in theaters. That is an animation first — no animated film has ever made more than $100 million at the box office in its first two weekends in theaters.
The Pixar sequel collected $100 million in ticket sales in its second weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, setting a new record for an animated movie in its follow-up frame in theaters. The previous best second weekend for an animated title was the $92 million for The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Only six movies ever have had better second weekends.
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Inside Out 2 is also the most successful film Pixar has ever had. And that is saying something, considering this is the studio that brought us Toy Story (1995), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), Up (2009), and Coco (2017).
Experts are now expecting Inside Out 2 to surpass the billion-dollar mark, making it the first film since Barbie (2023) to do so. It has also dethroned the wildly popular summer hit, Dune: Part Two, which grossed $711 million at the box office.
Inside Out 2 was exactly what was needed to help the struggling studio. Since the pandemic, Pixar has not had a successful theatrical release. Onward (2020) was forced to be released on Disney+ just weeks after its theatrical debut due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Months later, Soul (2020) also had to be released on Disney+ because movie theaters were still closed.
Then, Disney didn’t even bother to release Luca (2021) or Turning Red (2022) in theaters. When they finally released Lightyear in 2022, the film was one of Pixar’s biggest flops. Then, there was Elemental (2023), which did not perform well in theaters but had great reviews and performed incredibly well on Disney+.
Disney and Pixar hope the success of Inside Out 2 will signal good things to come for their upcoming releases. Pixar’s newest original story, Elio, is set to be released in 2025, and Toy Story 5 is scheduled for release in 2026.
Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter, has also revealed that an Inside Out series is on the way. The series is reportedly finished and will be released in the spring of 2025. The show will focus on Dream Production and show how Riley’s dreams are created. It will also explain why her dreams can be so weird.
Have you seen Inside Out 2? What did you think? Let us know in the comments!
