Thanks to a Polynesian princess, two witches, and a gladiator driven by retaliation, the domestic box office is set to record its largest Thanksgiving haul since the pandemic.
Disney’s sMoana 2 opened in theaters on Wednesday and is anticipated to bring in between $120 million and $150 million through Sunday. In their second week of domestic screenings, Universal’s Wicked and Paramount’s Gladiator II join it.
The five-day Thanksgiving weekend, which spans from Wednesday to Sunday, is expected to easily generate $200 million in ticket sales, according to box office analysts. It may even surpass the previous two or third-highest Thanksgiving period in movie history.
According to Shawn Robbins, director of analytics at Fandango and founder of Box Office Theory, the Thanksgiving moviegoing trifecta of Moana 2, Wicked, and Gladiator II is a true hit.
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According to him, the business has found it difficult to reproduce the all-audience appeal of major releases during the holiday in the post-pandemic age. With a holy trinity of tentpole movies that could lead to some of the highest overall box office numbers the Christmas season has ever seen, this year is very different.
Comscore data shows that the Thanksgiving holiday haul hasn’t exceeded $200 million since 2019. With a combined ticket sales total of $315 million, the top three Thanksgiving weekend films at the moment are Creed II, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, and Ralph Breaks the Internet. The $294.2 million obtained over the same five-day period in 2013 was the second-highest haul for the holiday period.
According to Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, Thanksgiving is perhaps the most significant holiday season for movie theaters since it sets the tone for the year-end box office race. The overall yearly box office income and whether it is viewed as a success or a failure for the industry will depend on how well the last few weeks of the year go.
Another animation victory would be nice for Disney.
With its recent run of movies, it has fallen short of expectations after dominating the Thanksgiving box office for years with Pixar and Disney Animation films.
Moana made $82.1 million when it debuted over the Thanksgiving weekend in 2016. Coco made $72.9 million when it opened the next year, while Ralph Breaks the Internet made $84.8 million over the course of its five-day launch in 2018. After opening the week before to over $130 million, Frozen II grossed $125 million over the Thanksgiving weekend just before the epidemic in 2019.
Encanto, on the other hand, had $40.6 million in 2021 despite arriving in the middle of the pandemic. Wish only made a pitiful $31.6 million in 2023, and Strange World failed, earning only $18.9 million for the 2022 holiday season. In 2020, there was not a single Disney animated movie released at Thanksgiving.
However, Moana 2 ought to do better than these post-pandemic releases. It comes to theaters a year after the first movie, which was deemed the most streamed movie for families and children, was released. And over the summer, Inside Out 2 from Disney and Pixar drew large crowds. Inside Out 2 made over $1 billion worldwide during its whole run, with a domestic opening of $154.2 million.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal, CNBC, and Fandango are all owned by Comcast. Wicked was distributed by NBCUniversal.
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