Summer box office buoyed by ‘Inside Out 2,’ ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’

Box office analysts and cinema owners braced themselves a few months ago for the possibility that the summer movie season could be the worst showing in a decade.

Thanks to some anthropomorphic emotions and a bad-mouthed, fourth-wall breaking antihero, the domestic summer box office scraped together $3.6 billion in ticket sales. While that’s a 10% drop from the same period in 2023, it’s a markedly better outcome than anyone in the industry was expecting.

“In the wake of the $4 billion ‘Barbenheimer’-powered summer of 2023, expectations heading into May were tempered as the industry braced for what would certainly be a more modest summer revenue result for 2024,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.

Entering into the summer movie season, which starts the first weekend in May and runs through Labor Day, the domestic box office was down 22% from the previous year and lacking the traditional kick-off of a Marvel Cinematic Universe flick.

In fact, it was the first time since 2009 that the summer box office didn’t have a blockbuster superhero film to start the season — and it showed.

Disney and Marvel Studios have consistently launched this highly lucrative moviegoing season over the last two decades. In fact, only two films in the Marvel franchise that released at the beginning of summer have generated less than $100 million on opening weekend — not including pandemic years.

This year, the headline film for the first summer weekend was Universal‘s “The Fall Guy.” And despite strong marketing efforts and solid reviews, the movie failed to drum up ticket sales. The film tallied less than $28 million during its domestic debut and stalled out shy of $100 million during its domestic run.

Warner Bros. and George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” also spun out. The high-octane action flick snared just $67 million during its domestic run.

Meanwhile, Disney’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” overperformed expectations, tallying $171 million during its run.

But it wasn’t until mid-June that the box office got a proper surge of moviegoers. Disney and Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” smashed records and marked the return of the beleaguered animation studio. Through Labor Day, the film was the highest-grossing summer movie with $650 million in box office receipts.

“Thankfully May gloom turned into a much needed June boom, as a string of box office overachievers set off a chain reaction that carried forward all the way into August,” Dergarabedian said.

The summer got another boost from “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which arrived in late…