At first glance, the $3.6 billion the studios earned from the summer domestic box office would seem like bad news given that receipts dropped 11% from last summer’s “Barbenheimer”-fueled $4 billion season.
But despite a sluggish start, Disney/Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” set theaters ablaze and helped put last year’s strikes in the rearview mirror. Now the industry is poised to enjoy the kind of consistently high business in the second half of the year that exhibition and studio executives have promised.
“There are very few films where we might ask, ‘What happened here?’” Boxoffice editor Daniel Loria told TheWrap. “All of the major titles that came out this summer either delivered as expected or, like ‘Inside Out 2,’ strongly overperformed, and the one month that was poor business can be attributed to the lack of a major franchise in Marvel that usually starts the summer.”