Inside Disney's billion-dollar blockbusters

With Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, Disney Entertainment has given unprecedented hits in the last two months. The former has already emerged as the highest-grossing animated movie ever

By Kathakali Chanda Forbes India Staff

Published: Aug 14, 2024 11:52:02 AM IST

Updated: Sep 5, 2024 10:17:15 AM IST

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(L-R) Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds attend the Deadpool & Wolverine World Premiere at the David H. Koch†Theater on July 22, 2024 in New York City. Image: Noam Galai/Getty Images for Disney/AFP

At 10 am every Monday, Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, gets together with the heads of his filmmaking studios to take stock of the week gone by. “We discuss how the box office is performing, how the titles are doing, what are the problem areas,” says Bergman, who leads globally acclaimed studios like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilms, 20th Century Studios. If box office numbers are anything to go by, the meeting on the morning of August 12 would have been one of joy and celebration.

The weekend before, Deadpool & Wolverine, a superhero flick starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, had crossed $1 billion in collections globally, while Pixar’s Inside Out 2, with collections of $1.5 billion globally had become the highest-grossing animated movie ever. In the space of two months, The Walt Disney Company’s portfolio of seven studios had delivered two back-to-back billion-dollar movies.

“It is really inspiring to sit around that table with this group of people. [CEO] Bob Iger made some strategic purchases which have been fantastic for us,” says Bergman, at a panel with journalists during the D23, Disney’s grand fan expo, at Anaheim, California. The gathering also included the creative heads of Disney’s studios—Disney, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Searchlight and 20th Century Fox.

Pixar, in fact, was one of Disney’s first acquisitions, in 2006, in an all-stock transaction valued at $7.4 billion. The company, which made Toy Story, the first-ever full-length computer animated feature film in 1994, has since delivered hits like Elemental, Turning Red and Ratatouille. But Pete Docter, its chief creative officer, says “it’s a bit of a mystery” why Inside Out 2, a story that personifies the emotions of teenager Riley Andersen, has been such a stupendous success. “I think people really liked the first one, and then [for this one] we hit something with anxiety. There's definitely anxiety in the world, and it’s kind of sad that we played on that. But we tried to explain it and give people tools to be able to talk about it in an entertaining way, with laughs,” says the Oscar-winning director of Monsters Inc, Up and Inside Out. Pixar is already working on a spinoff, a streaming series called Dream Production, based on a studio where Riley’s dreams are made every night “on time and on budget”.

Disney’s other billion-dollar achievement is the result of a $71.3 billion acquisition that Iger made in 2019, of 20th Century Fox, that brought in two studios (20th Century Fox and Searchlight), TV networks like FX and National Geographic, and popular franchises like The Simpsons, Avatar, and Deadpool. “This acquisition has given us back hundreds and hundreds of Marvel characters, and we’ve only gotten started with Deadpool & Wolverine,” says Kevin Feige, president, Marvel Studios.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has already crossed $30 billion at the global box office and, with over 700 characters, has secured a fanbase cutting across demographics. “One of the biggest Marvel hits on Disney Plus is the preschool show Spiderman and His Amazing Friends. And in theatres right now, the number one movie is the very R rated Deadpool & Wolverine. It shows Marvel fans understand where in the life cycle they fit in—from pre-school to adults. And that allows us to tell all sorts of stories,” adds Feige, one of the few film producers to have been honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Alan Bergman, Co-Chairman, Disney Entertainment. Image: Ronda Churchill / AFP

The acquisitions have also meant that the six films to have ever grossed $2 billion and above have all emerged from the directors and franchises that currently inhabit the Disney portfolio—of these, three belong to 20th Century Studios (director James Cameron’s Titanic and the two Avatar films), two to Marvel (Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War) and one to LucasFilm (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). At the Disney Entertainment Showcase last week, where the company revealed its content slate for the next two years, the third installment of the Avatar franchise, Avatar: Fire And Ash, was announced.

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What makes a billion-dollar film? Or does a successful film lead to an equally successful sequel? “It very rarely works that way… to sit down and go, ‘okay, how are we gonna make something even bigger? That rarely leads to success,” says Feige. “I do think, though, that we are very lucky here that we exceed expectations year after year to the point where, within yourself or the company or the public or the press, it becomes expected that everything will break records.”

He adds: “When, last year, we had some disappointments for the first time, it told us to not take successes for granted. The two very big celebrations recently for Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine just felt great and reminded everybody that this doesn't happen all the time and we should celebrate it.” Marvel hit a rough patch in 2023 with box office flops Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels—the latter has been the lowest-grossing Marvel movie of all-time.

(File) View of the theatre marquis at the world premiere of Pixar's "Inside Out 2" at El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles, California on June 10, 2024. Image: Michael Tran / AFP

Often, say filmmakers, it’s not till after the film is released that they get a whiff of which way the box office is going to go. “If we, as filmmakers, start to think from outside in, you can never make a great story that way. I don’t think any of us understood with Frozen or even Moana what we had,” says Jennifer Lee, chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, and the writer and director of the Oscar-winning Frozen. “Disney Animation hadn't done many sequels, or really one in all the years we've done features. And then we saw an opportunity with Frozen,” adds Lee. With $1.28 billion, Frozen II became the highest-grossing animation film before being overtaken by Inside Out 2 recently. The third movie in the series is set to be released around Thanksgiving 2027.

Acclaimed composer and lyricist Stephen Sondenheim, known for award-winning movies like Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and West Side Story, had once said musical comedies weren’t written, they were rewritten. It’s a leitmotif for a filmmaker too, says Docter of Pixar. “The iterative process allows you to make mistakes, which is key, especially when you're taking risks. You need the ability to make something and have it fall flat on space, and then try again and fall again,” says the bespectacled filmmaker. “I remember Joe Ranft [the late animator and screenwriter who had worked on Toy Story] who would say it's called showbiz for a reason. It's part show, part biz. I’m really conscious of the fact that we’re not making these movies for us. We're making them for the audience. The process of iterative storytelling is, in part, to expose the part that's going to be the most raw nerve, the most connective with everybody.”

Actor Jon Favreau, whose new directorial project with Disney, The Mandalorian and Grogu, which goes into production this year, perhaps has the last word on filmmaking. “Jon loves to cook, and every creative discussion with him ends up in food analogies,” says Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and eight-time Oscar-nominated producer. “He says you can make the same thing in different ways and it can taste different depending on the ingredients you use. It’s the same for our creative process—we're always looking for those new ingredients and those new ideas.”

Take Moana and Zootopia, different as chalk and cheese, but both hits delivered by Walt Disney Animation Studios, and both awaiting sequels in 2024 and 2025, respectively. Says Kennedy: “You try to take risks, you try to move outside of your comfort zone, and you hope that that's going to connect with people, and when it does, it's the most thrilling thing ever.”

(The author is at the D3 Expo in Anaheim, California, on the invitation of Disney)