Disney Leading 2024 Box Office With $3 Billion Worldwide

Walt Disney Studios is back on top at the box office. Frank Pallotta, the company’s Director of Enterprise Editorial Strategy, announced Monday that Disney is the first studio to cross $3 billion globally in 2024. That’s from just four wide releases across three divisions so far: Pixar’s Inside Out 2 ($1.5 billion), Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine (a still-growing $823 million), and 20th Century Studios’ Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes ($396.3 million) and The First Omen ($54 million).

Inside Out 2, which launched over Father’s Day weekend in June, was the first box office blockbuster of the year and stands as the highest-grossing movie of 2024 to date (though Deadpool & Wolverine is on track to become only the second billion-plus earner this year). The Pixar sequel reached the milestone in 19 days of release — the fastest for any animated movie — and has since surpassed Disney’s own Frozen II as the top animated movie globally before overtaking Marvel’s The Avengers to enter the top ten all-time highest-grossing movies.

The Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman-fronted Deadpool threequel, after 10 days in theaters, is already the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time domestically and has propelled the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise past $30 billion at the global box office. Disney’s theatrical slate for the remainder of the year includes 20th Century’s Alien: Romulus (out August 16th), Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Moana 2 (November 27th), and Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King (December 20th). 

Disney’s box office performance marks a rebound for the studio after its 100th anniversary celebration in 2023 was marred by modest underperformers (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the live-action The Little Mermaid), flops (Haunted Mansion and The Creator), and bombs (Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Marvels, and Wish). The only releases to be deemed a success: Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ($845 million) and Pixar’s leggy animated movie Elemental ($496 million). 

“We obviously want to build our studio back to making not only greatfilms consistently, but [to] our preeminent status in the business,” Bob Iger said during a company-wide town hall in November, where the Disney CEO addressed the company’s “disappointing” box office during its centennial. 

Iger, who returned to lead the company with the exit of his successor Bob Chapek in 2022, had left Disney on a high note in 2019. That year, Disney set an industry record of $11 billion and released a record seven films that passed the billion mark individually: : Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, Aladdin, Toy Story 4, The Lion King, Frozen 2, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

“I’ve talked about that [the box office] recently, because in assessing some ofour performance, recently, one of the reasons I believe it’s fallen offa bit is that we were making too much. I think when it comes tocreativity, quality is critical, of course, and quantity in many wayscan destroy quality. Storytelling, obviously, is the core of what we doas a company,” Iger said at the time, stressing Disney’s quality over quantity approach to its slate. “I spent the year with the team fixing a lot ofthings. But I feel that we’ve just emerged from a periodof a lot of fixing to one of building again — and I can tell you,building is a lot more fun than fixing.”

Disney will next report its fiscal third quarter 2024 financial results on Wednesday, August 7th.