Twenty years on, Cars is still racing.

The Pixar film's anniversary re-release has crossed $10.4 million at the North American box office in its first ten days back in theatres, according to numbers reported by Koimoi. That run has pushed the film's lifetime domestic total to $254.5 million, putting it less than a million dollars behind Mufasa: The Lion King's North American haul of $254.6 million, per figures from Box Office Mojo cited in the report.

It's a strange kind of milestone. Mufasa is a 2024 release, a prequel-sequel built on Barry Jenkins' name and Disney's current marketing machine. Cars came out in 2006, when John Lasseter was still directing Pixar's biggest bets and nobody had heard of Lightning McQueen. That a two-decade-old film is closing in on a title that came out barely two years ago says something about how re-releases have become a genuine box office category rather than a nostalgia stunt.

The numbers did soften in week two. Cars made $1.23 million over its second weekend back, an 80.4% drop from its opening frame, and it shed roughly 400 screens along the way, Koimoi reported. That's a steep fall, the kind you'd expect once the anniversary crowd has had its trip to the theatre and word has spread that this is the same Cars everyone already owns on disc.

But the drop doesn't change the bigger picture. This re-release, which opened September 4, has already tipped the film past $250 million domestically for the first time, something it hadn't managed in its original run or any prior re-issue. And Cars is reportedly tracking toward $500 million worldwide once its overseas numbers are folded in, which would be a genuinely odd outcome for a film that was, on release, seen as the weakest link in Pixar's run of that decade.

Critics were never fully sold on Cars the first time round. Reviews leaned toward praising the animation while flagging a thin story, the kind of split verdict that usually fades a film into cable-rerun territory rather than box office relevance. Audiences disagreed enough to build an entire franchise and a theme park's worth of merchandise out of it, and that affection appears to be the thing carrying this re-release now.

Whether Cars actually clears Mufasa's total depends on how much gas is left in the tank after that second-weekend fall. A million dollars is not a lot of ground to make up, but an 80% decline suggests the film may be running on fumes rather than momentum. Either way, expect the tally to firm up within the next week, once weekday numbers roll in.