MOANA 2 opening | Family genre update | Awards movies overview | November 29 to December 1, 2024 weekend

Opening weekend box office, charts and commentary

Dec 01, 2024

1) Moana 2 opening

- This is a spectacular, record-setting Thanksgiving opening weekend. For the 5 days, the estimate is $220 million — the biggest Thanksgiving start ever. For a follow-up animation sequel, it towers over the first film’s 3-day start, and it's more than double Disney and Pixar's exceptional average for these movies.

This was originally envisioned as a direct-to-Disney+ streaming production, before it was shifted to a theatrical release at the start of the year. Smart decision. These are gigantic numbers:

- It's Disney and Pixar's 11th second episode during the last 20 years, and all but two have grown their audience in their return. Other production companies have done this — Illumination (Despicable Me), DreamWorks (Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon, Madagascar), Fox (Ice Age, Rio, Alvin and the Chipmunks), and Sony (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) — but no one has done it as consistently and for as long as Disney and Pixar.

Starting with Inside Out 2 last summer, and with Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20, Disney/Pixar are in the middle of an excellent run. It follows a 3-year period during the pandemic when nothing seemed to work...
- Lightyear, Cruella, Encanto, Onward, Raya and the Dragon, Call of the Wild, Strange World, Ron's Gone Wrong — the top worldwide gross was $261m. In 2020, Pixar's Soul won the Academy Award for Best Animated Picture, but did not receive a domestic theatrical release because conditions would not support it. The pandemic was especially rough on animation. That was then, and this is now.

2) Family genre update

- A quick update on the genre and the chart. The Wild Robot is finishing with a very good $325m worldwide. It's not a juggernaut, but with stellar reviews and audience scores, it’s a series, and that's a significant achievement for an animated production that cost a reasonable $78m.

Family moviegoing in 2024 is going to total approx. $6.85 billion, and more if Moana and Mufasa break $2.2 billion between the two of them:

- Bear in mind, during 2020 and 2021, when parents would not take their kids to a theater because the risk of illness was too great, the studios threw themselves into streaming, encouraging and conditioning audiences to watch these films at home. They succeeded. Between 2019 and 2020, the worldwide box office for family movies dropped by -88%.

Starting with Super Mario Bros. in the spring of 2023, families have returned. There are natural advantages for parents; namely, moms and dads need activities to do with their kids, and even at today's ticket prices, it's an attractive value. While other genres are still stumbling, these films are thriving.
Paddington in Peru, on February 14, 2025, Paddington 2 finished with $228m worldwide, 82% of it overseas

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3) Awards movies overview

- We're in the prime of Awards season. Below is the chart on how these year-end pictures perform. A couple of patterns are central to this part of the business...

the releases average a strong 6.1x domestic multiple (6.1x the opening weekend). Conclave and Anora are already showing those kinds of legs, and other titles will get there. That is the design — to play for weeks;
these movies do well throughout the world. Even when the settings, characters and themes seem specifically local, the stories are about universal conditions and experiences that audiences around the globe can relate to. Those human themes are what make these movies interesting:

Overall

- We'll have November box office totals and our monthly chart next week. We're including this extra week for fair comparisons, so that each year has the full Thanksgiving week.

With Moana, Wicked and Gladiator, total Thanksgiving moviegoing is shattering records (the 5-day domestic estimate for all titles is $422m, the previous high was $315.6m in 2018). It's an enormous lift.
- Is the business back on track, again? Is everything okay, again? No. Parts of the business are doing very well, and parts are not. 2024 has been a volatile and moody year at the box office. Next year is when we'll see how complete the recovery will be.
  Babygirl, an erotic thriller starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas, opens December 25, currently with a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score from 52 critics

Our last two posts were:
WICKED PART 1 | GLADIATOR 2 openings | Legacy sequels | Where we are now | November 22 to 24, 2024 weekend here
RED ONE opening | All the small wide releases | November 15 to 17, 2024 weekend here