Thanksgiving 2024 is shaping up to be one for the box office record books. Moana 2 has shattered box office records after just two days in release while holdover titles Wicked and Gladiator II are posting excellent box office numbers. It’s yet another Thanksgiving box office weekend showing that this holiday is ripe for audiences to feast down on movies of all shapes and sizes. For studio executives, Thanksgiving weekend is one of the most reliably lucrative times of the year.
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However, one weekend after Thanksgiving’s glorious box office numbers is one of the biggest box office dead zones of any given year. The post-Thanksgiving timeframe (typically either the last weekend of November or December’s first weekend) is always a dreadfully slow time at your local multiplex. What’s going on here? Why is the post-Thanksgiving box office weekend consistently a box office black hole, especially so soon after Thanksgiving’s riches?
Post-Thanksgiving Weekend Never Has New Movies
As late as 2003, major studio releases like The Last Samurai and Honey opened over the post-Thanksgiving timeframe and scored $10+ million opening weekends. Heck, The Last Samurai opened to a robust $24.27 million and continued to play in theaters through the end of the year. However, 2005’s Æon Flux proved such a big flop that the tide began to shift against this timeframe. That same year, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire became the first-ever movie to open to $100+ million in November. Doing so over the pre-Thanksgiving weekend, it was still making money once that fateful post-Thanksgiving frame rolled around.
With both flops like Æon Flux and a new crop of increasingly lucrative pre-Thanksgiving tentpoles in the marketplace, studios began abandoning the post-Thanksgiving weekend. Just six years later, the only new wide releases were Brothers, Armored, and Everybody’s Fine, none of which grossed over $10 million during their respective three-day weekends. In 2012, Ray Subers of Box Office Mojo observed that it had been seven years since a motion picture opened to $10+ million over this post-Thanksgiving timeframe and that no new wide releases opened over 2011.
With major studios largely eschewing this timeframe, a toxic cycle has festered for the post-Thanksgiving timeframe. No new movies are ever released during this weekend, so it’s assumed hits can’t thrive in this domain. It doesn’t help that the post-Thanksgiving weekend is an awkward time of the year when people have other things on their minds. Shopping for the holidays and seasonal-specific events take precedence for folks in the earliest days of December. Plus, many are saving their money and energy to head to the movies for the deluge of fresh releases arriving with Christmas. Thus, it’s hard to launch a new must-see motion picture this weekend.
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The Few Modern Post-Thanksgiving Hits
2015 wasn’t just the year that Star Wars came roaring back to theaters, nor was it the year Carol changed cinema forever. It was also the year where, for the first time since Æon Flux, a new wide release opened to $10+ million over the post-Thanksgiving frame. Krampus took home that honor with a $16.3 million three-day bow far above pre-release expectations. With just this cheeky Yuletide horror/comedy, the viability of the post-Thanksgiving slot was reaffirmed. This frame wasn’t innately a black hole sucking movies down into it.
Since then, only two further hits have launched in wide release over the post-Thanksgiving weekend. Fellow Universal Pictures grimy Christmas movie Violent Night debuted to $13.4 million in early December 2022. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé opened to $22 million the following year, the second-biggest post-Thanksgiving opening weekend ever (only behind Last Samurai from 2003). Despite these two back-to-back early December smash hits, the post-Thanksgiving 2024 doesn’t have a major tentpole release, though at least it will feature roughly six new wide releases, a sharp contrast to the desert of fresh features in early December 2011.
Old habits die hard, even in the glitzy world of Hollywood. That means the post-Thanksgiving slot will likely remain a box office dead zone in the near future, simply because that’s been the norm for so long in Hollywood. Then again, 2025 will see Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 open over this weekend. Perhaps that potential mega-horror hit will finally upend this timeframe’s reputation as a dumping ground for new theatrical releases. It would be fitting for that to happen 20 years after Æon Flux seemed to cement post-Thanksgiving as the worst possible time of year to launch a new motion picture.