Movie theater owners can take a cue from Riley, the protagonist of Inside Out 2, and quell their anxiety. The Pixar film massively outperformed expectations at the box office and scored the biggest opening of the year so far with $155 million domestically and $140 million overseas, outpacing earlier 2024 blockbusters like Dune: Part 2. Industry prognosticators, still reeling from the historically bad Memorial Day Weekend box office, expected the animated movie to make just $80 million its opening weekend.
The movie’s success is great news for Pixar and Hollywood. Pixar has been suffering a creative and commercial slump the past few years. And just one year after the Barbenheimer phenomenon, the 2024 box office has been off to a grim start, with high hopes dashed (see: The Fall Guy, Furiosa) and too much pressure placed on individual titles, like the recent Bad Boys sequel, to save the entire season. Had Inside Out 2 failed—a determination increasingly made as quickly as opening weekend comes and goes—Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter recently admitted to TIME that the studio wou…