‘Inside Out 2’ Is Now the Biggest Animated Movie Ever

Pixar is back on top. Their latest film, Inside Out 2, is not only a hit, it’s not the top-grossing animated film in history — with a fairly substantial asterisk.

Disney and Pixar are touting that Inside Out 2, with its $1.462 billion in grosses worldwide, is now the biggest animated hit ever. Its ticket sales put it ahead of the previous record holder, 2019’s Frozen II, also from Disney, which grossed $1.453 worldwide.

Disney is also touting the fact that Inside Out 2 is the fastest animated film in history to $1 billion. (It took the movie 19 days to cross that threshold.) It’s also the top-grossing movie of 2024, as well as the only movie of the year to date to gross $1 billion.

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Now, with all that said, what is the asterisk? It is this: In making this bold claim, Disney is essentially ignoring its own animated movie, 2019’s remake of The Lion King. If you include The Lion King as an animated movie, then it is the highest-grossing animated movie in history, with $1.663 billion in worldwide ticket sales.

Why does Disney not count it? They apparently view the movie as a “live-action” remake of the original Lion King, akin to the studio’s live-action versions of Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Beauty & the Beast, or The Jungle Book. The difference, though, is that while all of those films did include digitally-animated characters, they also featured real flesh-and-blood actors. 2019’s The Lion King does not. All of the “live-action” animals were actually computer generated.

In fact, according to The Lion King’s own director, Jon Favreau, there is just one “real shot” in the entire movie, plus “1490 rendered shots created by animators and CG artists.” Favreau joked on Twitter in 2019 that he “slipped in one single shot we actually photographed in Africa to see if anyone would notice.”

Despite all of that, Disney does not consider this Lion King an animated movie. And if you don’t consider it an animated movie, then yes, Inside Out 2 is the box office champ.