The last time The Walt Disney Company attempted a puberty-themed, “becoming a woman” film aimed at kids, it didn’t go so well. Now, only a few years later, they’re back at it again.
In 2022, Disney released a coming-of-age movie called Turning Red. The film features a young Asian girl in middle school who acts rebelliously towards her overbearing mother, ultimately seeing the teen win by “twerking” in the grand finale battle. And, yes, the enemy is her kaiju-style mother as they both turn into giant red pandas in a not-so-subtle reference to menstruation. Unfortunately for Disney, Turning Red was an utter box office bomb. The film made a grand total of $10 million at the box office three months after Spider-Man No Way Home picked up record-breaking totals. Yet Turning Red was largely moved to streaming by Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek, due to fears of the pandemic, but more likely due to worries audiences would provide a marketplace blackeye to Disney were it released as normal to box offices.
As a consequence, Turning Red is one of Disney’s most costly failures of all time, losing an estimated $340 million in all. Disney would later re-release Turning Red into theaters for 2024, hoping to recoup some of those losses. The film failed again, this time perhaps even more miserably, only pulling in slightly more than a million domestic dollars, despite contractual obligations that had theaters showing it three-straight-weeks on more than one-thousand screens nationwide.
Image from Turning Red, Copyright 2022 The Walt Disney Company
So it does come with some surprise that Disney would so quickly return to the theme that didn’t work. Inside Out 2 is on the way, and while many CinemaCon first viewers enjoyed a half-hour sneak peak, it doesn’t wash away the precarious nature of Disney’s theming.
That’s not to say that films or entertainment covering female puberty as a topic are verboten or should be dissuaded. When done well, these types of media content can be a great resource for young women growing up to understand their bodies, their emotions and their potential in the world. However, it’s hard to ignore that a movie circling around feminine issues of leaving childhood tend to also have relatively smaller audience potential. After all, whether you think it’s right or wrong, many men and boys just aren’t excited about sitting down to learn about the “red panda” for ninety minutes.
“I’ve played a lot of joyful characters over the years, but none of them mean as much to me as Joy,” Amy Poehler at CinemaCon in 2024.
While we’re hearing from our sources that Inside Out 2 may be just as quality a product as the first one, that doesn’t negate worries that the quality could be great but the potential could simultaneously shrink. Then again, perhaps Inside Out 2 can avoid some of the more divisive takes on parent-child-relationships that Turning Red took on. One thing seems for sure, however: Inside Out 2 is not shying away from the puberty aspect one bit:
All is well until one night when puberty hits – it’s literally a blinking red light on their emotion console – and a demolition crew shows up for an extreme makeover, even putting up a construction warning sign many parents know all too well: “Puberty is messy.”
We’re no prudes here on That Park Place, and were this the Disney of the 90s or aughts, we’d likely have far more confidence in what Pixar could do with a story such as this. But we’ve been down the Lightyear path before. We’ve ventured with Disney Animation into a very Strange World. And in that context, there should be worry that the original Inside Out’s lofty billion dollar box office haul is a bar too high for modern Disney. That said, I would personally love to be surprised. It would bring me great joy if this film threads the needle and produces a timeless tale audiences love. I’ll celebrate along with Disney and Pixar if they achieve such a thing. And I’ll be overly happy for theater owners who desperately need wins this year in any place they can achieve them.
All of that said, for Bob Iger this is a crucial barometer. If Inside Out 2 fails with audiences in the way Wish did, investors had better get ready for a very real divorce from Main Street. If it can come even close to the billion dollar original, Mickey Mouse may be on his way to reconnecting with the majority of consumers. That’s why this Pixar film is sure to bring joy or sadness to more than just moviegoers. Take note, Burbank.
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Inside Out 2: Seeing Red Ink.