Weekend predictions: Inside Out heading towards $100-million or more on opening weekend

Inside Out 2 will post the biggest weekend of 2024, based on our current tracking, and on a stellar $13-million in previews on Thursday. $100 million looks like a virtual certainty, and, if it behaves like similar animated films, and opening around $120 million looks on the cards as of Friday morning.

If the numbers hold, the start for Inside Out 2 will be comfortably ahead of the first film in the franchise:

Our model’s prediction for Inside Out 2 stood at $83 million before we had the preview figures. That would be the biggest weekend of 2024, but only by the narrowest of margins—Dune: Part Two opened with $82.5 million back in March. With the pedigree of the film, and audience interest running high, what was really holding back the prediction was our model’s estimate of the current strength of the market.

Dune earned $12 million from previews, which was also the record for the year until yesterday. Inside Out 2’s $13 million most likely locks it in for the biggest weekend of 2024:

Family-oriented animated films tend to have fairly high Thursday-to-weekend multipliers, even when their preview numbers are strong. A multiplier as high as Toy Story 4’s (which would be fairly typical) would take it to $130 million this weekend. That’s definitely on the cards, but post-pandemic multipliers have generally been a little lower than the pre-pandemic numbers. If it can manage a multiplier of 7.7 or higher, it’ll cross the magic $100-million barrier. Of the five animated films with previews in this ballpark, only one, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, had a multiplier lower than that. So as a rule of thumb, there’s about an 80% chance Inside Out 2 will hit the century mark, although it would take something of a collapse over the weekend for that to happen.

Here’s what the model thinks that top 9 will look like.

Inside Out 2 is obviously the really big news this weekend. Bad Boys: Ride or Die will probably fall fairly steeply, but it has been performing well during the week. The model is predicting a decline of just 55%, which would be excellent.

Overall, it looks as though this will be the best weekend for the market as a whole for 2024 so far. In fact, it will most likely be the best weekend since August 4–6 last year, when Barbie was still topping the charts in its third weekend.

Finally, it looks like we’ll have a weekend to celebrate in theaters this year.

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com