Inside Out 2’s Success May Signal the Return of the Movie Theater Experience

Disney Pixar’s Inside Out 2 passed the billion-dollar benchmark this Sunday, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2024, the first film since Barbie to make $1 billion at the global box office, and the first animated film to have reached this mark in 19 days.

One can see why the Pixar sequel has garnered so many viewers. It is a wholesome and creative depiction of emotions, centered around a broadly relatable teenage girl struggling to balance the anxieties of status and change with her identity as a “good person.”

But Inside Out 2’s merits do not account for the whole story of its success. The truth is that audiences are craving for good movies to go see at the theater, and a sequel of a successful Pixar film with no political messaging or “woke” content is the best excuse to do so. (READ MORE: “‘Who You Gonna Call?’: Ghostbusters Reboot Reaffirms Traditional Values”)

Not only is Inside Out 2’s success a win for Disney and Pixar, but it is also a major win for movie theaters. Michael O’Leary, president and CEO of the National Associations of Theatre Owners, remarked that “[T]he film’s stunning global success once again illustrates that audiences the world over will respond to compelling, entertaining movies, and that they want to enjoy them on the big screen.”

A similar trend was seen last year with the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon surrounding the theatrical release of Warner Bros. Pictures’ Barbie and Universal Pictures’ Oppenheimer. The simultaneous release of the two films, in spite of targeting different audiences, sparked an enthusiasm for the big screen that had not developed since the months prior to the pandemic in 2020. It was also the first time in several years that the theaters were filled for movies that were not tied to a particular franchise, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) or the DC Extended Universe.

The success of stand-alone films like Oppenheimer, or even sequels like Inside Out 2, may be signaling the return of a more traditional and, indeed, more meaningful cinematic experience — one that is not centered around building clues and expectations for upcoming movies, but solely around the quality of the film’s thematic and production material.

For instance, the latest MCU film to be released, The Marvels, reportedly lost $237 million and was officially ranked the lowest grossing MCU movie. Starring exclusively female protagonists, it was both promoted and perceived as an explicitly feminist superhero story. Hence, the success of Inside Out 2 seems to communicate that viewers are tired of having their films be platforms for progressive politics. And, perhaps more importantly, it also shows that theaters are not a forum for never-ending franchises with little to no creativity in their story-telling.

Although streaming movies on platforms like Netflix and Hulu is convenient, nothing quite replaces the communal experience of engaging with cinema publicly, nor the excitement that is uniquely produced by watching a film on the big screen.

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