After a Disney Animation-best $13.8 million from Thursday’s domestic previews and record-shattering Thanksgiving Day $28 million stateside, Moana 2 is riding a wave of audience love to nearly $110 million through Friday. Opening weekend is on course for north of $300 million worldwide box office, a staggering sum that heralds a strong holiday season at the box office.
A beautiful starlight night at sea in “Moana 2.”
Source: Disney
Word Of Mouth For ‘Moana 2’
Moana 2’s A- grade from audiences via Cinemascore points to strong word of mouth heading into the Christmas holiday season.
Combined with an equally impressive 87% Popcornmeter grade from verified audiences at Rotten Tomatoes, where 65% of critics rank the film “Fresh” (but only roughly half of the expected reviews are in yet, so the Tomatometer will likely change in the coming days), Moana 2 looks to have smooth sailing ahead.
Families are the key demographic here, obviously, and the equally impressive and record-setting second weekend of Universal’s Wicked proves there’s plenty of room for more than one blockbuster player over the holidays, as long as you give audiences what they want and deliver on the promise of the premise.
And judging from the turnout, both Moana 2 and Wicked do exactly that. Besides Moana 2’s $300+ million bow, Wicked should conjure up another $100+ million this weekend as it eyes roughly $320 million globally through Sunday.
This summer, Disney-Pixar enjoyed the year’s biggest box office performance with the highest grossing animated release of all-time, Inside Out 2. That film’s $1.69 billion also made it the eighth-biggest movie — animated or live-action — of all time.
Christmas Competition For ‘Moana 2’
Making Moana 2’s Thanksgiving debut even more promising is the forecast of open seas ahead at multiplexes until mid-December, when the Christmas box office hopefuls arrive in town with visions of blockbuster glory dancing in their heads.
New Line and Warner Bros. Discovery’s The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim and Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) villain origin movie Kraven the Hunter arrive December 13th.
I expect The requirements to suffer the same sad fate as the rest of Sony’s recent superhero releases. It’s been a tale of diminishing returns from the get go — Venom kicked off the SSU with $856 million back in 2018, but the sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage dropped to $506.8 million in 2021, and this year’s Venom: The Last Dance is looking at perhaps a $475 million worldwide finish if it’s lucky.
Morbius in 2022 took a lousy $167 million off terrible reviews and low audience score, and earlier this year Madame Web set a new low with $100 million. These are worldwide totals, mind you. So I expect The requirements to miss the hunt for Christmas bonuses, with perhaps $400 million (if not less) if Santa brings some seasonal boost.
On the other hand, The War of the Rohirrim wields the powerhouse branding of Lord of the Rings at the box office. The Lord of the Rings and prequel The Hobbit franchise have grossed a combined $5.933 billion in worldwide box office, including the animated The Hobbit film in 1978.
So a performance of merely $67 million by The War of the Rohirrim would push the franchise into $6 billion territory, and even without the 1978 animated ticket sales the series is still less than $100 million away from that $6 billion bar. And the two live-action trilogies are $5.9 billion on their own, with a per-film average of $983 million. But can the new feature release count on the same sort of attendance?
Warner set the stage with the remaster 4K re-release of The Lord of the Rings trilogy this summer, grossing a combined $18.5 million worldwide despite just three days of release for each film (each film released one after the other on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday for three weeks in a row).
The added element of animation might help boost family holiday turnout (even with its PG-13 MPAA rating), or alternately might suppress broader mainstream adult attendance due in part to (sadly mistaken) bias against serious dramatic animation in domestic markets. How much this is or isn’t a factor probably depends on how the rest of the competition shakes out.
December 20th brings the first true contender that will take a big bite out of Moana 2’s target demo, when Paramount unleashes Sonic the Hedgehog 3 into theaters. The first two Sonic films combined for $725 million, the second at $405 million, so the Christmas timing will bring added riches to the third chapter, at least north of $500 million but probably considerably higher, as there’s tremendous buzz so far.
That said, Disney’s Mufasa: The Lion King prequel is expected to be the real King of Christmas Season, and it’s never smart to bet against the House of Mouse, especially a chapter in one of its most lucrative series. The original 1994 The Lion King stands at $980+ million, while 2019’s “live-action” (in reality, photo-realistic CGI animated) The Lion King roared to a mighty $1.66 billion.
Disney’s success with these modern remakes of classic blockbusters have mostly been enormously successful, although they’ve definitely taken a hit in the Covid era. I don’t expect any such decline to manifest for Mufasaespecially with a cozy holiday calendar date, but don’t count Sonic the Hedgehog 3 out of the race, it should overperform and challenge for those early pre-Christmas dollars.
Dark horse candidate and Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown freewheels its way into theaters Christmas Day, and it could wind up a breakout performer and Oscar season favorite, not to mention the draw of Timothée Chalamet. Parents might drop their kids to see Sonic and Mufasa while the adults head over to the Dylan flick — and the teenagers might go with them.
Can ‘Moana 2’ Take The Crown?
But Moana 2 is going to build a big box office lead for the next two weeks, and should see another surge when Christmas arrives. So even with the expected weekly declines and the arrival of competition eating into target demographics, there are plenty of films that will play moderate or less, leaving enough money on the table for Moana 2 to benefit even as new arrivals dominate weekend sales.
Keep in mind, despite summer box office competition including major animated franchise sequels and billion dollar Marvel movies, Inside Out 2 still held strong and put up the best animated revenue of all time.
Moana 2 appears to be opening even bigger than Inside Out 2so while it’s not a direct comparison, there is reason to think come Christmas Day we could be looking at a new contender for 2024’s biggest box office hit.
While 2024 has had more than its share of stumbles and will end the year down overall, Moana 2 is just what audiences were waiting for to kick off the holiday season in style — a big and beautiful family film with built-in nostalgia, music, star power, and easy entry for new child viewers.
