NEW YORK -- If there’s one emotion that Disney and Pixar are probably feeling right now, it’s joy.
That’s after movie sequel “Inside Out 2” became the highest-grossing animated film of all time, raking in US$1.46 billion at the global box office and dethroning former record holder “Frozen 2” from 2019, according to Disney on Wednesday.
That’s giving a much-needed boost to Hollywood, which saw a slow start to the summer season and is still grappling with the effects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes of last year.
“Inside Out 2” hit theaters last month and passed the US$1 billion mark just 19 days after its release — the fastest ever for an animated film. It’s currently on week six of its theatrical run and has already bagged a spot as the 13th highest-grossing film of all time.
“From Europe to Asia, the Middle East the U.S., you just see incredible, record-breaking numbers for a movie,” said Daniel Loria, editorial director at Box Office Pro, which collects sales and showtime data from thousands of movie theaters across the United States. “It’s definitely a great success story, not only for movie theaters here in the United States, but all over the world.”
The film has already made history in the Americas, quickly becoming the highest-grossing film in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Uruguay’s cinema scene.
And Loria predicts the film could end its theatrical run with even higher numbers as it prepares to open in Japan next week, having already enjoyed successes across Asia and the Pacific, making US$84 million just after 12 days of release.
“It really breathed new life into the global box office and reestablished a momentum that we haven’t seen since the ‘Barbenheimer’ craze of last summer,” Loria said.
The excitement surrounding the “Inside Out 2“ release comes after the film industry was met with a slow start to the summer movie season.
“The record-breaking performance of ‘Inside Out 2’ has been incredibly important for movie theatres as the film swooped in and changed the mood of this industry that, at the time of the film’s release, saw a summer movie season that was being written off as a box office bust,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.
Last summer, blockbusters “Barbie” (which is distributed by CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery) and “Oppenheimer” combined added nearly a billion dollars to the domestic box office, according to Comscore data. So far, 2024 has yet to produce a combo with that same box-office draw.
CNN’s Eva Rothenberg contributed to this report.
