‘Inside Out 2’ fills Disney with joy, even if its culture-war critics stay angry

As emotions go, Disney’s loudest critics might sound angry, but “Inside Out 2” is bringing the studio nothing but joy.

As emotions go, Disney’s loudest critics might sound angry, but “Inside Out 2” is bringing the studio nothing but joy. The Walt Disney Co. has often found itself cast as a reluctant participant in the culture wars, yielding occasional calls for boycotts and proclamations the company has become “too woke.” Yet the explosive box-office success of “Inside Out 2” provides necessary perspective about a vast audience that remains hungry for Disney content, certainly enough to generate a major hit. Granted, those who regularly rail against Disney – which was drawn into a political battle with Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, beginning in 2022 over the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill – have sought to rationalize the performance of the Pixar sequel, insisting its plot doesn’t toe the “woke” line the way something like the studio’s latest “Star Wars” series, “The Acolyte,” does. Notably, a review-bombing campaign has been waged against the latter, depressing its score on the critic-aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes to almost comical levels. Look a little closer, though, and “Inside Out 2” features an effortless emphasis on values like diversity and inclusion that have helped make Disney a target. The Disney unit behind it, Pixar, also enjoyed a less-ostentatious box-office win last summer with “Elemental,” a movie that used an allegorical relationship between characters made up of fire and water to explore bigotry, the immigrant experience, and a love story about overcoming differences. Whatever the reason – and with the sequel coming nine years after the original, pent-up demand is surely a part – there’s no denying “Inside Out 2’s” results, with the movie adding $100 million at the North American box office during its second weekend – a record for an animated film – bringing its domestic total to $355 million, eclipsing “Dune: Part Two” as the year’s top movie in just 10 days of release. Worldwide, the film’s haul has ballooned to nearly $725 million. “Inside Out 2” will almost surely join the increasingly rare list of $1 billion-plus grossers since the Covid outbreak, which consists of sequels to “Avatar,” “Top Gun,” “Spider-Man” and “Jurassic World” as well as “Barbie” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.”