If 2024 will be remembered for anything, it will be the absolute return of Disney at the box office.
After a string of events films that weren’t events in 2023, i.e. Pixar’s Elemental, The Marvels, The Haunted Mansion and Wish, the Mouse House came raging back this year, becoming the only motion picture studio to cross the $2 billion threshold with three of the top five films in Inside Out 2 ($652.9M), the highest grossing R-rated movie of all-time Deadpool & Wolverine ($636.7M) and Moana 2 ($342M). And that amount is only going to go higher with the release of Mufasa this Friday, that prequel’s opening set to do $50M. There’s also Searchlight’s James Mangold-directed Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, opening wide on Christmas Day.
Disney’s domestic tally includes grosses from its 20th Century Studios and Searchlight labels.
It’s the second time that Disney has flown past $2B since 2019, the last time being in 2022. It’s also the seventh time since 2010 that Disney has grossed more than $2B at the U.S. and Canada box office.
Pixar’s Inside Out 2 is the 11th highest grossing movie of all-time at the domestic box office and the No. 1 highest grossing animated release of all-time domestically. Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine is the No. 2 release of 2024 and the 12th highest grossing movie stateside. Moana 2 is currently the fifth highes grossing movie year-to-date. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Alien: Romulus from Disney’s 20th Century labels also both earned $171M and $105M respectively.
While the Bob Chapek Disney era ramped up a plethora of content in an effort to respond to the demands of the Disney+ launch and audiences’ appetite for streaming during Covid, what we’re seeing now are the fruits of the Bob Iger administration. His mission since taking over from Chapek, as expressed in a November 2023 town hall: “I think when it comes to creativity, quality is critical, of course, and quantity in many ways can destroy quality.”