Exactly one year out from the Barbenheimer phenomenon, it’s clear that Pixar’s Inside Out 2 will be the juggernaut of the summer box office. Last year’s huge openings for Barbie and Oppenheimer generated goodwill among cinephiles and the general public alike. Movies are back! People are still interested in seeing original content on the silver screen! Though even this last contention had to bend a bit since Barbie comes from a popular toy line and Oppenheimer is a stealth prequel to Godzilla.
But Inside Out 2 is a direct sequel and comes after a dispiriting remarks by Pixar chief creative (and director of the original Inside Out) Pete Doctor about the studio’s renewed focus on sequels and reboots after the studio’s recent original efforts failed to gain much of a return. This is especially irritating considering that most of these films were dumped onto Disney+ during the pandemic. Soul, which similarly imagined an industrialization of the human condition like Inside Out, had the makings of a hit. The gentle Luca was maybe always destined to be “smaller” Pixar fare, but it’s easy to imagine big box office for Turning Red with its fluffy red panda magic infusing a story that, like Inside Out 2, is about a preteen entering puberty. Elemental is also included in this besmirched era of the studio. That movie made truckloads of money but it did so slowly and, unlike the other examples, sucked, which doesn’t help its case.
Whatever craven math Pixar is using to justify this strategy, it’s a downer to hear for people already fatigued with projects that prioritize branding over story. It’s particularly vexing for Pixar to get rewarded so quickly and definitively for the first dubious sequel after an Oscar-winner with the word “creative” in the title walked everyone through the cold calculus running the show. And it’s head-on-fire infuriating that the audiences who streamed into this spreadsheet of a film, this event that played on their stimulus responses like Pavlov torturing a mutt… were rewarded with a damn good time.
Cards on the table: I’m going to walk through my thoughts here because unlike billionaire accounting, my math on this likely to be scrutinized by disagreeing parties – 1) Inside Out 2 is a good movie. 2) I value original movies over sequels and prequels and what have you. 3) Therefore I want Inside Out 2 appreciated but not supported.
That first point is where a lot of people – professional critics and respected friends alike – are finding the flaw. But speaking as a skeptic when I entered the theater, Inside Out 2 is a good movie and audiences are not wrong to give it their attention. I’m talking good movie, better than “3-stars not as good as Ratatouille.” I’d suggest it’s better than the first Inside Out, although that’s a tricky assertion since the scaffolding of the first movie is necessary for the success of the second. It’s not the best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s not the best anything. But it is worth the two hours I gave it. At the end of the showing I attended with my family the Sunday after movie opened, the respectably-sized crowd applauded. Here I’m siding with the basic parents and their unwashed urchins in that audience.
I chose to take my family to Inside Out 2, even though I did not want a sequel to Inside Out 2. My other choices that could accommodate viewers ages 9-43 were The Garfield Movie, Kung Fu Panda 4 and If. Those first two are at best lateral moves as far as avoiding IP-driven movies, and far less promising as far as avoiding mindless sarcasm and fart humor. As for the only original option If, I let critic Scott Tobias be my guide: “Krasinski has attempted to make a grand-scale tribute to a childhood creativity and resilience, which here is not only banal, but not thought-through at the most basic level. You know it’s not filmmaking by committee because a committee would have had notes.” A movie so bad it puts Tobias in a Pete Doctor state of mind!
Inside Out 2 benefited from a lack of competition, but I don’t think being a slightly better option than the umpteenth iteration of Garfield makes people burst into spontaneous applause. I think IO2 speaks to audiences about – and I swear I’m not trying to be cute here – what’s on their minds. And maybe audiences, even us beleaguered parents looking for a couple hours of entertainment with less blood than the other options, crave something that examines their anxieties rather than avoids them.
The previews before the movie were extremely dire. Mufasa: The Lion King, Moana 2, Transformers One, and the most hideous vision of Harold and the Purple Crayon imaginable – I needn’t worry about Disney learning the wrong lesson from the runaway success of its latest sequel. Clearly the lesson was absorbed long ago. And considering this isn’t the first time Pixar has overperformed with an unpromising follow-ups, maybe it’s time to examine my own anxiety around the math that drives the biggest movies. I don’t think following the money will lead to better movies, I still think greater competition and imagination will do that. But in the meantime, I may need to learn to embrace the miracles when they occur.
