Pixar can breathe easy with Inside Out 2 earning a historic $155 million for its domestic opening weekend and $295 million globally, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

While Anxiety was a new emotion introduced to the sequel to its Academy Award-winning 2015 movie, neither Disney nor Pixar is feeling that emotion. The sequel was projected to earn $95 million on its opening weekend, but it clearly surpassed that mark.

Inside Out 2's success is exactly what Pixar needs due to its several years of lackluster box office results, including the time the former Disney management sent three of the animated studio's films directly to streaming.

Could Inside Out 2 join the billion-dollar club?

Inside Out 2 characters surrounded by money

The sequel is the first movie since last year's Barbie to cross over the $100 million in its first days of release. For comparison, Barbie's opening weekend earned $162 million domestically. If Inside Out 2 performs the same way in the box office, it has a huge chance of joining the Mattel doll in the billion-dollar club.

According to the high praise heaped upon it by critics, it should be right on tract. It currently has a Tomatometer of 92%, Certified Fresh, with a higher audience score of 96% from more than 1,000 verified reviewers. On CinemaScore, it garnered an A grade, and on Metacritic, it has a generally favorable critic and audience score of 74 and 7.5 respectively.

Fandango announced the its early ticket sales broke the record of its 2015 predecessor and is also the highest Pixar advance ticket pre-seller since 2019's Toy Story 4. The film then started with $13 million when it opened on Thursday for its evening previews. On Friday, estimates were adjusted to tracking $130 million to $140 million. Later that evening, even rival studios were saying that it could end up making between $140 million to 150 million. However, Disney and Pixar wanted to play it safe and stuck to the $140 million-plus figure.

Comparing it to past Pixar films, it's still a little short of Incredibles 2's incredible achievement in 2018, opening with $182.7 million. With its 2015 predecessor, though, it comes out on top since that movie opened with $90.4 million. But those are pre-pandemic, pre-strike numbers so factoring those two seismic events, Inside Out 2 is actually doing quite well.

How well?

It's the second-highest in Pixar's history. That means number two out of 28 movies since 1995's Toy Story. The studio has had five movies that broke the $100-million opening weekend mark. Number five is 2010's Toy Story 3 with $110.3 million. In fourth place is Toy Story 4 which made $120.1 million in 2019. Number three is 2016's Finding Dory with $135 million.

If Inside Out 2 goes the way of movies numbers one and three to five on that list went, there is a very solid case of the movie earning at least $1 billion. Finding Dory has a worldwide gross of $1.03 billion, while Toy Story 3 and 4 both made $1.07 billion. And the top of the list? Incredibles 2 earned an incredible $1.24 billion worldwide.

However, I understand why both Disney and Pixar are wary of these estimates. Its last movie, last year's Elemental only opened with $29.6 million and has a worldwide box office earnings of $496.4 million. In 2022, Lightyear only opened with $50.6 million and currently sits on a $226.4 million worldwide gross. And that's with Captain America, Chris Evans, voicing a younger Buzz Lightyear. Earlier in 2022, Turning Red only made a little over half a million dollars when it opened. Its worldwide box office earnings is at $21.8 million, the lowest in Pixar's history.

While the 2021 film Luca was released in cinemas in countries that didn't have Disney+, it was only given a week to run at Hollywood's El Capitan theater while it was already available on the streaming service, which is why it doesn't have opening weekend numbers. However, it was given a theatrical release this year in March. Even with — or because of all that — the film only grossed $51.1 million.

Pixar's movies released in 2020 didn't fare well either. Soul had an opening earnings of $431,840 and worldwide gross of $121.98 million, while Onward opened with $39.1 million and a global earnings of $141.9 million.

The double whammy

Before 2020, every single Pixar movie had a worldwide gross of at least $300 million. In fact, of the 19 movies the studio released before 2020, 15 earned north of the $500 million mark, and four of those surpassed $1 billion in worldwide box office gross. And that's not even adjusting for inflation. If we did, only 2015's The Good Dinosaur and 2017's Cars 3 are the ones who didn't clear the half-a-billion-dollar mark.

Even though its chief creative officer Pete Docter lamented about how creating original content is getting harder and harder, it's not the only reason for the challenges. The pandemic changed a lot of things. It made people realize that they CAN enjoy movies in their own homes. Obviously, even when people were allowed to go out and go to the movies, Hollywood was still playing catch up because their own people were able to go out at the same time the rest of us were.

And then the strikes. I'm not blaming anybody. With the way the industry changed so drastically during the pandemic, the people working in it were effectively left behind. While the streamers were raking in the bucks, the people behind the projects that were being streamed weren't. Something had to be done, hence the dual strikes.

In the same interview, Docter said that if Inside Out 2 doesn't do well, they'll have to rethink how they do business. But with the film on track to be one of Pixar's biggest success after 2020, maybe he'll think of doing more sequels. The one thing he won't do: live-action remakes of their properties.

Fathers Day Weekend at the movies

Speaking of live-action movies, others that were also showing alongside the animated sequel is Will Smith's “redemption movie” Bad Boys: Ride or Die. It's on its second week and contributed to a 30% increase compared to last year. However, the fourth installment of the Bad Boys franchise fell 42% in its second weekend but redeemed itself by clearing the $100 million bar domestically.

Number three this weekend was 20th Century and Disney's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes as it comes close to the $400 million figure. Number four is Alcon and Sony's The Garfield movie. The number five slot is being fought by Paramount's IF, John Krasinski's CGI/live-action hybrid film and Warner Bros.' The Watchers.