Here are the 4 Penske trades story promos on Sunday about the Inside Out 2 second weekend box office. It was the top story on only 2 of the 4 digital papers. The Hollywood Reporter proudly led with Taylor Swift bringing Travis Kelce on stage at her London concert. You know, important industry news.
The stories are all rather positive, which you would expect given that the movie is setting a variety of records. But we live in a moment of damning with faint praise or worse.
Do you get the sense from these most-read pieces of box office insight - the headlines - that after 10 days, Inside Out 2 has made, by estimate, $5 million more than Barbie, last summer’s movie that saved the industry? Or that the 10-day total is $60 million more than Top Gun Maverick, which was 2022’s movie that saved the industry?
Or that if A Quiet Place: Day One opens to more than $32 million next weekend, it will be the first time since 2018 that 3 June releases opened to more than $31 million apiece? And that those 2018 titles were Incredibles 2, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Ocean’s 8?
Or that if A Quiet Place: Day One opens to more than $42 million, this June will have been the only June in the history of cinema with 3 openings over $41.6 million?
Respect to Indiewire’s Tom Brueggemann for the direct reference to Barbie in that headline… but it still comes with a question mark in it. Why?
Deadline’s story, if you click through, has the estimated gross at $100 million, not the $98m+ on the cover (upper right hand corner above)… don’t get me started on Anthony’s back-handed admission that the $100 million number comes from Disney. (Last weekend, the Sunday morning estimated was $500k high, for whatever that’s worth.)
The Hollywood Reporter’s Pam McClintock mentions Barbie, but the overall headline is leaning into the 2nd weekend, suggesting that Inside Out 2 “only” beat Barbie’s 2nd weekend, as opposed to its 10-day total.
Rebecca Rubin’s Variety front-pager in ambiguous and only references the 2nd weekend.
So why do I care so much, you may ask?
Because this is the tip of the excrement iceberg.
Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw, who is generally 3x more insightful than his podcast pal Matt Belloni, writes of the Inside Out 2 second weekend:
“It’s a cultural phenomenon, and proof that the movie business is increasingly one of feast or famine. The big hits, like Inside Out 2 and Barbie, are massive cultural moments. They go viral just like the Eras Tour or Baby Reindeer. But if there is no momentum behind your movie, it dies.”
This is not only destructively wrong on its face, but it speaks to a long history of dumb ideas - like ”the theatrical business is dying” - which once taken seem to inspire endless rationalizations for why the dumb idea wasn’t really wrong for years to come, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
I don’t think Lucas or others who keep insisting on what facts do not support are consciously malicious. But they can’t or won’t see past the postures they have taken in the past.
Does anyone really believe that Inside Out 2 is the culture explosion that was Barbie last summer… much less BarbieHeimer? I’ve been to the movie theaters a few times this last week and I haven’t seen a single person dressed up as the Inside Out characters.
I’d say that the idea of comparing Inside Out 2 to The Era Tour or Baby Reindeer is just simple dog crap, except it would be an insult to dog crap. Movies are not the same thing as a pop music touring phenom or a successful streaming tv show. And by definition, Inside Out 2 is not a 1-off.
Don’t even get me started on the industry-wide refusal to note that Inside Out 2 started as a direct-to-Disney+ movie. I assume that Disney sees this as somehow diminishing, but I see it as quite the opposite… it is a triumph of the basic understanding of what it takes to make something “a movie” as opposed to a “tv movie.” And they succeeded brilliantly.
And the final Shaw “insight”… “ if there is no momentum behind your movie, it dies.”
Writers like Shaw don’t understand that the obsessive compulsion to claim the movie industry is “boom or bust” and nothing of value in between is ahistoric nonsense.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Hot Button to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.