Disney is on a roll in 2024, topping $3 billion in worldwide ticket sales as their latest Marvel Studios release Deadpool & Wolverine sits at around $850 million today and heads toward $1 billion box office by its third weekend of release.
Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman star in “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Deadpool & Wolverine should reach roughly $900 million headed into its third weekend. So, by end of business next Sunday, the Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman starring blockbuster sequel from director Shawn Levy, who cowrote with Reynolds, should easily top $1 billion.
Meanwhile, Pixar’s chart-topping Inside Out 2 continues to defy even bullish expectations, and actually managed to drop a mere 25% last weekend despite losing 17% of its screens. The sequel, from director Kelsey Mann with screenwriters Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, is already the highest-grossing animated film in cinema history, Pixar’s highest earner of all time, and easily the biggest film of 2024 so far.
At its present trajectory, and assuming continued strong holds but still the inevitably drop-offs, Inside Out 2 should top $1.62 billion if it stays in release long enough — which there’s every reason to expect at this point in the summer box office season. Disney is doing the bulk of the heavy lifting so far this summer, including Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ $397 million cume, Inside Out 2’s $1.55 billion, and Deadpool & Wolverine’s $850 million. Overall receipts are still way down, however.
Despicable Me likewise continues a leggy blockbuster run at $755 million and counting, after a fantastic hold last weekend. It should have enough momentum to carry to at least $780 million and more likely north of $800 million. While that’s not the billion dollar business to which the franchise is accustomed, it’s an impressive sum in the post-Covid theatrical era and big enough to be among the year’s top films.
Animation continues to do more than its share in the effort to revive box office, and we can expect that to continue as the year progresses. Upcoming releases The Wild Robot, Moana 2, Mufasa: The Lion King, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, Transformers One, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, and Spellbound all hope to score sizable pieces of the 2024 box office.
Most of those upcoming animated films look positioned for at least modest success, if not more. Several will be blockbusters — including likely hits like Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King, which will significantly pad Disney’s coffers this year. Disney will almost certainly finish the year with at least $5 billion, and more likely somewhere around $6.5 billion.
I can’t help wondering how many studios are having regrets about pulling out of the summer season or shelving — and sometimes outright reportedly erasing or destroying — films that could’ve delivered sizable box office benefits after all.
Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, for example, [in]famously wound up shelved so that Warner Bros. Discovery could take tax write-offs. In retrospect, however, there’s a solid chance that a Batman-themed live-action release and another iconic animated series would’ve delivered at least enough to exceed the roughly $50 million or less (probably significantly less) the tax write-offs offered the studio in cost-cutting.
Indeed, even a relatively cheap $50 million for a combined marketing blitz with heavy reliance on viral campaigns and simultaneous release of both films with a “family weekend out” framing for the holidays might’ve resulted in several hundred million extra dollars for WBD, as well as avoiding hiding the filmmakers’ work.
That said, Batgirl was also cancelled because the studio simply had no intention of moving forward with the DCEU and felt it was pointless to invest any more money in completing the film or marketing and releasing it. There’s also a strong desire to let the dust of the DCEU settle and clean everyone’s palate ahead of the 2025 relaunch with the DCU’s live-action first chapter Superman from writer-director James Gunn (who also serves as co-CEO of DC Studios, alongside producer Peter Safran).
Lastly, with Matt Reeves’ own separate Batman franchise continuing next year with the release of The Batman – Part II and this year’s Max miniseries The Penguin dropping next month, so it was deemed ideal to avoid stepping on any of those future plans by releasing a now-moot (in the eyes of the studio, at least) sequel that would still needed additional investment to finish and release.
That’s separate from the argument Batgirl could release on PVOD and streaming exclusively instead, or that audiences are smart enough to tell these films apart. In the context of whether to save the film and release it in 2024 to take advantage of a dearth of new releases in some frames, Batgirl is less a seeming fumble in that regard than Coyote vs. Acme, which was by all accounts fabulous and would’ve fit right in with this year’s disproportionate reliance on the power of animated cinema to prop up a weak box office and fulfill audience desires for precisely the sort of movie.
But there’s still obviously more than enough animated fare for audiences eager to eat it up. And meanwhile, Deadpool & Wolverine is proving “superhero fatigue” only need a little nap for audiences to recover. The sequel will top last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to become the highest-grossing superhero movie since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.9 billion), making it the second-biggest superhero release of the Covid era.
I also think Joker: Folie à Deux will be a big hit when it releases this October, as will The Batman Part II and Superman when they hit the big screen next year. And Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps drop next year to likely blockbuster business (although I think Thunderbolts is admittedly the riskier of those projects), while both Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars are already generating lots of buzz and enthusiasm for 2026 and 2027.
It was up to Deadpool & Wolverine to plant a flag for Marvel in 2024 and revive the MCU after a rocky 2023, and to that the Merc with a Mouth can already say, “Mission Accomplished.”
