May 27, 2025: 2020s Blockbusters: Inside Out 2

[Moviegoing has unquestionably changed a great deal in recent years, but there is still a place for the summer blockbuster, and I believe there always will be. So for the unofficial kickoff of another summer season, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent such blockbusters!]

On two distinct ways to contextualize the highest-grossing film of 2024.

First of all, there’s absolutely nothing surprising about the fact that Inside Out 2 was 2024’s top-grossing film. As the above hyperlinked list illustrates, five of the year’s top ten films were animated, and a sixth (Mufasa: The Lion King) could certainly be defined as such as well (and at least represents a sequel to an animated film; well, a prequel, but you know what I mean!). Moreover, the other four of the five top-grossing Pixar films of all time were likewise sequels, including Incredibles 2, Finding Dory, and the third and fourth installments in the Toy Story franchise. While animated films might not fit our stereotypical definition of a summer blockbuster (at least not as well as did yesterday’s subject Top Gun: Maverick, for example), in truth there’s no surer thing in Hollywood than drawing kids to the movies over the summer, and of course most such kid audience members will require at least one adult ticket purchase to accompany them. Moreover, while many films over the last few years have not made it to theaters at all, it seems to me that big-budget animated films are still likely to have at least some form of theatrical run, making it even more probable than ever that such films will occupy prominent places in the roster of box-office blockbusters.

With all those caveats aside, however, it’s still interesting to me that Inside Out 2 specifically tops both of these lists (ie, is both 2024’s and Pixar’s highest-grossing film), and I think we can contextualize that striking success in a couple distinct ways. I haven’t seen the film, but from what I can tell it is very much in conversation with a longstanding and consistently popular film genre: high school dramedies, and especially high school dramedies focused on teenage girls’ experiences. That is, by aging the original Inside Out’s protagonist Riley Andersen up two years and making her an incoming high school student in the sequel, director Kelsey Mann and her co-screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein made a very smart choice, taking what had been more of a children’s film initially and shifting it into that teen/high school setting and genre. To cite just one example (of a film celebrating its 30^th anniversary this summer, which doesn’t make me feel ancient or anything), Clueless (1995) was one of the most unexpected summer blockbusters of the 1990s, raking in more than $10 million its opening weekend to put it just behind the far more conventional summer film Apollo 13 in that weekend’s box office. Teenagers might be an even more reliable summer audience than young kids, as they can get themselves to the movies—and these consistent teen hits indicate as much.

It would be wrong to suggest that such teen hits always or only focus on female protagonists—Stand By Me (1986) opened in August, to name just one male-centered teen blockbuster. But I do believe that a significant majority of these summer successes are more focused on female characters and thus (to be reductive about it I know) on appealing to women as a primary audience—and in the case of Inside Out 2, while of course its female protagonist was an existing character to whom the sequel understandably returned, I think it missed an opportunity to add in a teenage boy as (for example) a second protagonist with his own set of animated emotions. I fully understand how fraught that idea might be in execution (as the Dad of two still-teenage sons, believe me I fully understand it), but I would also note (as many others have as well) that one of the central stories of the last few years has been a two-part failure to engage with teenage boys’ emotional lives: a failure of our society as a whole to do so; and a concurrent failure of teenage boys to find healthy outlets for doing so, leading far too many of them to the likes of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan et al. Obviously those are issues way beyond any one film or even the medium as a whole—but if there’s gonna be an Inside Out 3, I’d love for it to take a stab at the complicated and crucial question of young men’s emotional lives.

Next blockbuster tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Summer blockbusters, recent or otherwise, you’d analyze?