Christmas came early at the box office this year. Moana 2 brought in a tidal wave of moviegoers over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, setting records with $221m in ticket sales, according to studio estimates. That, combined with Wicked and Gladiator II, made for an unprecedented weekend in cinemas.
Expectations had been high for Disney’s Moana 2, but the film’s five-day opening set a new record for Thanksgiving weekend. (The previous best was $125m for Frozen 2 in its second week of release in 2019.) Moana 2 added $165.3m internationally; with $386m worldwide, it’s the second-best global launch of the year.
At the same time, Wicked showed no signs of slowing down. The Universal Pictures musical brought in $117.5m over the five-day weekend, pushing its two-week global total to $359.2m. Wicked is now the highest grossing Broadway adaptation over Grease. (The latter film grossed $190m on its release in 1978, but factoring in inflation would put it past $900m.) Gladiator II also held well, dipping 44% from its opening weekend. Ridley Scott’s sequel to his Oscar-winning original collected $44million in its second weekend. While its steep price tag of $250m will make profitability challenging, Gladiator II has made $320m worldwide.
Those three films drove the overall box office to a record $420m in overall Thanksgiving weekend ticket sales, according to Comscore – over $100m ahead of the previous best, $315m in 2018.
For an industry that has been battered in recent years by the pandemic, work stoppages and the upheaval caused by streaming, it was a triumphant weekend that showed the still-potent power of Hollywood’s blockbuster machine. Before Wicked, Moana 2 and Gladiator II, ticket sales were running about 25% behind pre-pandemic levels.
Michael O’Leary, president and chief executive of the National Association of Theatre Owners, said: “We’re very optimistic that this weekend is the start of what we believe is a full-on charge into the future,” he said. “The remaining quarter of this year looks very promising and then on into 2025 and 2026. We’re hoping next year is the first kind of normal year this industry has had in a long time.”
“For a long, long time in Hollywood, there’s been a belief that you don’t put big blockbuster movies up against each other,” O’Leary added. “But the truth of the matter is that competition is good. It’s good for the movies. It’s good for the studios. It’s good for the theatre owners. But it’s particularly good for the movie-going public.”
Moana 2 was the nexus of a strategy shift for Disney. When it first began development, it was designed as a series for streaming. But when Bob Iger returned as chief executive, he reconsidered the balance between theatrical and streaming and in February he announced the release of Moana 2, with Auli’i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson returning as the voices of Moana and Maui.
It has helped lead a resurgence for The Walt Disney Company, whose last two animated November releases – Strange World and Wish – fizzled in theatres. Moana 2 may become the third billion-grossing movie for the studio in 2024, after Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.