From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business. National Geographic's genius series

has focused on one genius at a time, but when Gina Prince Bythewood and Reggie Rock

Bythwood were asked to create a show about Martin Luther King, they came up with the idea

of weaving in the story of another civil rights era icon, Malcolm X.

To the byzoids, it felt especially urgent to tell their stories now.

There is a backlash happening, and it's not just in our industry.

Obviously, you see what's happening with, you know, our history being rewritten and erased and DEI being abolished and outlawed.

I mean, it's a very, it's a very dangerous time, and that's absolutely reflected in our industry.

The husband and wife duo talk about the challenge of dramatizing the lives of two towering

historical figures, doomed contemporaries who followed very different paths in the fight for equality.

But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.

I am joined by my partner in banter. Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt. Hi there. So, Joy has come to Mudville for multiple reasons. One of them is that Inside Out opened to a gigantic number.

It raced to $155 million in the U.S., went to almost 300 worldwide. This is not only a great relief for theater owners and other studios

seeing something succeed, but Pixar had been this question mark. Do they still have it? Can they

still do it? And they've done it. Yeah, you can almost hear Pete Doctor and Jim Morris, the heads of

Pixar exhaling over this opening. And the movie is actually doing great midweek business. I think the Juneteenth holiday helped as well. This is likely going to get to a billion dollars, which is a huge vote of confidence for Pixar. I mean, this is a studio that had had one disappointment after another. Elemental ended up doing okay last summer,

but Lightyear, total disaster. Then the three movies during the pandemic that Disney sent straight

to Disney Plus, there was real questions over whether Pixar was still a box office brand.

And I think that that has been answered now for a certain kind of movie. We still need to see

Pixar open an original to, you know, some crazy numbers, but at least for pre-branded movies where

everybody loves the IP and has such goodwill for the original, they have proven they can get people

back to the box office. Yeah, and I think people, you know, the idea that people want to have fun.

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