"In the summertime," as Mungo Jerry might've crooned, it's time for pools, BBQ's, and trips to the movies. With kids out for this season, Hollywood's taken to making summertime a go-to launchpad for animated family films. Just look at summer 2006, when a whopping five PG-rated animated films hit theaters. Summer 2013, meanwhile, saw six (if we count the heavily animated live-action feature The Smurfs 2) such titles reach multiplexes.
Anyone who follows release dates as obsessively as I have might have noticed some relatively recent patterns in how these summertime animated titles are scheduled. Disney has cornered mid-June as the launchpad for Pixar titles (starting with Cars in June 2006). Often, another animated movie opens either two weeks before or after the latest Pixar release. That's happening right now with Minions: The Rise of Gru launching just 12 days into Toy Story 5's run. Other recent examples of this exact release scheduling include...
SUMMER 2012
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted (June 8)
Brave (June 22)
SUMMER 2013
Monsters University (June 21)
Despicable Me 2 (July 3)
SUMMER 2019
The Secret Life of Pets 2 (June 7)
Toy Story 4 (June 21)
SUMMER 2022
Lightyear (June 17)
Minions: The Rise of Gru (July 1)
Studios clearly love cramming as many animated family films as possible into the lucrative June/early July corridor. But does this release strategy actually work? Can multiple animated family movies co-exist in such close quarters?
In one of the many weird paradoxes littering the film industry, this release strategy is both nothing new and unprecedented. Studios cramming titles into seemingly "foolproof" release windows for family films, that's not new. In the 80s and up to 1991, Disney and Universal constantly released their respective new animated family features against each other. Once Beauty and the Beast trounced An American Tail: Fievel Goes West in 1991, though, that was the end of that. Disney was back on top of the animation game. Studios began keeping their distance between their new animated titles and whatever the Mouse House was putting out.
Thus, once Disney began launching animated productions like The Lion King in the summertime in 1994, there weren't new rival animated features launching just two weeks earlier or later. Disney's Pocahontas was basically the only major G-rated animated family film in all of summer 1995 (though Universal's Casper and Babe were around to deliver live-action family fare). Even when Hercules bombed in summer 1997, there were still no other animated family films in sight. It would take the 2001 DreamWorks title Shrek to really get studios comfortable with launching non-Disney animated titles in the summertime.
Even once other labels got in on the summertime animated family movie game, there was often a month-ish separating animated tentpoles. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron hit theaters May 24, 2002, and then three weeks later, Lilo & Stitch caught some waves. That exact same timeframe separated Over the Hedge and Cars, while over a month existed between Up and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Summer 2012 appears to have been the shifting point, when Madagascar 3 and Brave opened on June 8 and June 22, 2012, respectively.
Interestingly, neither of these titles debuted on their initially announced release dates. Madagascar 3 was once set for May 25, 2012 (mirroring the first Madagascar's Memorial Day launchpad), while Brave was set for June 8. Madagascar presumably left May because that month (which was steadily becoming the domain of new Marvel Cinematic Universe movies) was getting crowded. This above all else explains why studios often cram new animated films together. There's more competition than ever before for "ideal" summer release date slots. May used to be the place Shrek and Kung Fu Panda 2 opened; now it belongs to superhero fare and live-action Disney remakes. With fewer release slots available, more and more animated family films are crowding into limited space.
Enough blabbering, though. With all that historical context out of the way, does it actually help or hurt these animated features to open so close to one another? Usually, the two can co-exist...but there's a catch. Only once (before 2026, at least) has this phenomenon occurred, in which one of the two animated films was a $400+ million domestic box-office juggernaut. Often, both films, like in June 2012, are set to make $210-$235 million each. Easy to see how two motion pictures could survive there. When the numbers get bigger, though, it's hard for the struggling animated film to get out of the shadow of its rival.
Illumination faced this problem when The Secret Life of Pets 2 bowed two weeks before the massive Toy Story 4. Minions: The Rise of Gru just missed the $400+ million domestic mark, but its massive North American run totally overshadowed Lightyear, which opened two weeks earlier. Offering a little breathing room when one of these titles is a massive tentpoles helps everyone. Finding Dory, for instance, temporarily became the biggest animated movie of all time domestically when it hit theaters on June 17, 2016. Three weeks later (not two), The Secret Life of Pets debuted and became one of the largest original motion pictures in history. Even just an extra seven days was crucial in making sure Pets didn't get swept up in Dory's success.
Still, sometimes certain movies in these release equations bomb because of reasons separate from opening so close to another animated family film. Cars 3, for instance, was already a box office non-starter before Despicable Me 3 wiped it out in its third weekend of release. Lightyear already collapsed 60+% in its second weekend before Minions: The Rise of Gru bowed. In contrast, last years Elio didn't have to contend with any new animated features until weeks into its theatrical run. That couldn't save it from immense box office failure. Oftentimes, it's the films themselves that are the biggest issue.
This tight release plan would also be less of a problem if studios used the medium of animation to make more varied family movies (or, heaven forbid, animated films not aimed first and foremost at children). Multiple animated PG comedies trying to court the same audiences can ultimately cannibalize each other. That inevitable outcome reflects the dangers of looking at the endless varied medium of animation as strictly a "babysitting tool".
Madagascar 3 and Brave in June 2012, in hindsight, looks like an ideal slate of cramped animated features. The former's immense wackiness is very different from Brave's more action-oriented Scottish antics. Minions and Monsters is making less than all prior Despicable Me movies, but it has a reasonably different aesthetic from Toy Story 5. On the other hand, The Secret Life of Pets was already thought of as a Toy Story clone when it first hit theaters. Why on Earth would you try launching a sequel to it so close to a proper Toy Story installment?
The very existence of such release date quandaries would've been unthinkable 30 years ago when no non-Disney animated family films dared to open in the summertime. Heck, it wouldn't be until 1998's final months that The Rugrats Movie and The Prince of Egypt became the first non-Disney animated movies to hit $100+ million. Animated cinema has absolutely exploded in the last few decades, to the point that multiple major animated tentpoles are competing for the prime summertime release date slots. Time for a remix of Mungo Jerry's "In the Summertime" with lyrics newly conscious of how often Pixar and Illumination go toe-to-toe in this season.
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