June box office up 7%
Total UK and Ireland box office in June was £71.4m, according to the latest figures from Comscore, up 7% compared with June 2023 (£66.6m).
Year-to-date box office revenue is now tracking 7% behind the equivalent period last year. In May, the year-to-date decline was 9%, following a 29% fall in that month.
The top-performing film of June was Pixar’s Inside Out 2, which achieved the highest opening of 2024 so far at £11.3m, overtaking Dune: Part II (£9.3m). However, in the year to date, the latter maintains the top spot for now.
It was the best-performing three-day opening across all genres since Barbie last summer (£18.4m) and in the genre since Frozen 2 in November 2019 (£15.1m)
Inside Out 2 was followed in the June rankings by action-comedy Bad Boys: Ride or Die (£10.6m), which achieved the biggest opening of the franchise, and A Quiet Place: Day One (£4.5m).
Surpassing expectations
Tom Linay, content business director at Digital Cinema Media (DCM), the UK’s largest cinema sales house, said Inside Out 2‘s performance both in the UK and globally was “the big story” of the month.
He explained: “It’s surpassed everybody’s expectations, not because people didn’t think those films could do that, but post-Covid Pixar sent some of their films to streaming and people had argued that the public had got used to watching Pixar on streaming. But it shows that the public still want to see Pixar films at the cinema.”
In the UK, Inside Out 2 had already garnered 3.5m DCM admissions still with the school holiday season to come and Linay predicted that this figure could reach 6m.
Globally, Linay expected the film to take up to $1.5bn, putting it “in the very top echelons of biggest animated films of all time” — something that could put Inside Out 3 on the cards.
And perhaps contrary to commonly accepted knowledge about animated features, DCM’s early audience data suggests that Inside Out 2 “is not a family film playing with really young kids” but delivering for 16-34s.
Linay revealed that, to date, the film has delivered 10 16-34 TVRs — comparable to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 last year.
Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the June film slate “has been a bit thin”, as is “often the case” when there is a major football tournament like Euro 2024.
Next month, there will be a tough comparable, with the Barbenheimer phenomenon giving the box office a double-digit lift last year.
However, Linay anticipated Inside Out 2 continuing to do “strong numbers” in July, alongside new arrivals Despicable Me 4, Deadpool & Wolverine and Twisters.
Looking ahead
Linay spoke more broadly about the film slate in the second half of the year and in 2025 at DCM’s Upfronts this week.
In H2, upcoming releases include Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Joker: Folie à Deux, Transformers One, Venom: The Last Dance, Paddington in Peru, Gladiator II, Moana 2, Wicked and Mufasa: The Lion King.
He called the line-up of Paddington In Peru, Gladiator II, Wicked and Moana 2 coming out on consecutive weekends “the strongest line-up we’ve had in that all-important November corridor for years”.
DCM’s TVR forecasts for the upcoming 2024 films are as follows: 19 (16-34) for Joker: Folie à Deux; 6 (16-34) for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; 7 (16-34) for Smile 2; 19 (houseperson with kids) for Paddington in Peru; 13 (16- 34 women) for Wicked; and 12 (houseperson with kids) for Moana 2.
Looking ahead to H1, Linay highlighted sci-fi film Mickey 17 in January, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy on Valentine’s Day and Minecraft in April.
Meanwhile, in H2, Danny Boyle returns with 28 Years Later, Scarlett Johansson stars in the fourth instalment of Jurassic World, alongside Frankenstein spin-off The Bride, one of the biggest animated films in Zootopia 2 and the third Avatar offering at the end of the year.
