“Inside Out 2” is continuing to break records even after leaving theaters.
The Pixar film — which became the highest-grossing animated movie of all time this year — also debuted as the top streaming premiere for 2024 on Disney+. It hit the streamer on Sept. 25 and has amassed 30.5 million views worldwide in its first five days.
The sequel is the No. 1 theatrical premiere on Disney+ since 2021’s “Encanto” and the biggest film premiere of all time for the streamer in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
Back in July, “Inside Out 2” passed 2019’s “Frozen II” and its previous record-holding $1.45 billion global run. It also managed to beat out last year’s highest-grossing film “Barbie,” which pulled in $1.44 billion. The film blew by high expectations when it earned $154 million in its opening weekend and crossed the billion-dollar threshold in a mere 19 days.
“Inside Out 2” also marks a return to form for Disney and Pixar after some less-than-stellar outings from “Lightyear” and “Elemental.”
The sequel is a coming-of-age story about a now-teenaged Riley (Kensington Tallman) and the Emotions that make up her personality. Joy (Amy Poehler) and the returning crew are thrown for a loop when their headquarters is renovated to make room for Riley’s latest emotions: Anxiety (Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Houser).
TheWrap reviewer William Bibbiani said the mature, sensitive sequel was a worthy but inconsistent follow-up to the original.
“The new ‘Inside Out’ makes our Logic hurt — or it would, if Logic existed in this universe — but more importantly it connects on a personal level, with dazzling animation and memorable characters, and valuable ideas that need to be explained sometime but rarely are, especially in film for younger audiences,” he wrote. “It doesn’t quite stack up to the original, which was funnier and sadder and made slightly more sense, but it’s not a sequel’s job to be better than the original. It’s a sequel’s job to tell another story worth telling, and no doubt about it, ‘Inside Out 2’ gets that job done.”
“Inside Out” and “Inside Out 2” are available to stream on Disney+.
