Culture Crash: The Summer Box Office Is Finally Heating Up

After a slow start and many meltdowns from Hollywood insiders, the 2024 box office has finally picked up some steam. In short succession, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Inside Out 2, and A Quiet Place: Day One hit theaters and brought crowds with them.

First came Bad Boys: Ride or Die, a fun action comedy that doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel but puts Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in positions to succeed.. And by making over $100 million worldwide in its opening weekend, proved that Will Smith is not the box office cancer post-Oscars slap that many pundits assumed he would be.

Then came the big one. Pixar was in something of a drought as of late with straight-to-Disney Plus pandemic releases and mixed reception on movies like Lightyear and Elemental. But Inside Out 2 has proven that Pixar still has the juice to catapult a movie to the top of the charts. The sequel to the beloved 2015 Oscar winner ages protagonist Riley up a few years and adds new emotions Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. The movie is fun, colorful and emotional. Though not quite as good as the original in my estimation, the movie works, and that was made clear by the fact that it shot to over $1 billion in global returns in just 19 days, making it the highest grossing movie of the year and the fastest an animated movie has reached the billion dollar mark.

Finally, Lupita Nyong’o added yet another success to her resume, with A Quiet Place: Day One raking in almost $100 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Beyond just a box office win, though, Day One is a rich character study hiding in a monster invasion movie. Director Michael Sarnoski, along with Nyong’o and her castmates Joseph Quinn and Alex Wolff inject what could have been a shlocky third installment in a horror franchise with tons of pathos and human payoff.**

As the box office continues to recover from the streaming revolution, the COVID pandemic, and last year’s Hollywood strikes, hits like Inside Out, Bad Boys, and A Quiet Place prove that there is still audience appetite to head to the theaters. With the back half of the year set to release new Deadpool and Wolverine, Beetlejuice, Joker, and Gladiator movies, there may be hope for the 2024 box office after all.