Best movies for 2024: Are Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine coming to save the box office?

When it comes to unlikely collaborations, a touchy-feely animated character called Joy and the potty-mouthed, blood-soaked savagery of Deadpool is right up there. But it’s this duo, with the assistance of a mostly incompetent and semi-verbal army of Minions, who carry the responsibility of saving the theatrical box office from one of its worst performances in 25 years. The US summer, which Hollywood studios measure from the first Friday in May to America’s Labor Day weekend at the start of September, is a widely accepted yardstick for the industry. And, until recently, it’s been a cruel summer indeed. If you throw out the peak pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, where COVID-19 fears and lockdowns in effect shut down the box office entirely, this year was in danger of posting the lowest American summer take since 1998. And, as the old saying goes, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, so Australian cinema’s having been doing it tough, too. The problem is two-fold — a lack of big releases and, of the films that have been released, a slew of underperforming titles. The former is a direct result of last year’s actor and writer strikes in Hollywood, which delayed productions, and contributed to a belief in the industry that it was better to push releases into the future and aim for a bumper 2025. As a result, this year’s US summer slate alone lost a Mission: Impossible sequel and two Marvel superhero movies, Thunderbolts and Captain America: Brave New World. That removes serious earning potential from the release schedule, and exacerbates the disappointing box office returns of movies such as Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which earned $255 million globally against a reported budget of $250 million. Other movies released in the US summer have had middling success at the global box office, from Ryan Gosling’s remake of The Fall Guy to John Krasinski’s kids film, IF. Even a moderate success such as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fifth highest-grossing film of the year so far, still made nearly $150 million less than the previous instalment of the franchise. In fact, Furiosa, Planet of the Apes, The Fall Guy and IF combined barely made more at the box office globally than last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3, which amassed $1.3 billion on its own. Throw in a few high-profile flops, from Madame Web to Argylle, and the economic outlook in the movie industry was anxiety-inducing to say the least. And then along came Inside Out 2 last month, which, somewhat ironically, features Anxiety as a scene-stealing character. The sequel to Pixar’s Oscar-winning 2015 animated classic about the emotions inside a girl’s head has been the shot in the arm the box office desperately needed. The movie, which has a voice cast including Amy Poehler, Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling, is racing towards the $2 billion mark and is already Pixar’s highest-grossing film. Another animated movie is also fuelling a box office recovery – Despicable Me 4. The latest adventure of Gru, the supervillain turned hero, and his army of Minions, knocked Inside Out 2 off top spot at the US box office in its opening weekend, and is about to cross the $400 million mark. But the real source of optimism in Hollywood right now is the potential box office bonanza that might be Deadpool & Wolverine. The third instalment of the Ryan Reynolds-led franchise adds Hugh Jackman’s legendary Wolverine, despite the character suffering an on-screen death in 2017’s excellent Logan. Fans clearly aren’t too worried about Logan’s Lazarus-like comeback, with industry box office tracking projecting the film to have an historic opening weekend for a movie that carries an R-rating in the US. An estimated take of $240 million in American theatres would set the film up nicely to surpass a billion dollars globally, with the potential for much more. The bad news is this recovery may prove to be a dead cat bounce when the Deadpool dust settles, because the month following its release could go either way. Director M. Night Shyamalan is a boom-or-bust proposition at the box office, so it’s hard to predict how his new mind-bender, Trap, will perform, and the jury is well and truly out on Alien: Romulus, Borderland, starring Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, and a reboot of The Crow. At this point, it looks like the global box office will fall short of last year’s mark of $50 billion, but cinemagoers can still look forward to an array of enticing (albeit largely derivative) releases to come. Unless something dramatic happens, Beetlejuice 2, Joker: Folie à Deux, Venom: The Last Dance, Gladiator II, Wicked, Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King should all get people back into the cinemas.