Disney’s Moana 2 sailed past the box-office doldrums of 2024 and crested all financial expectation to solidify a new record as the biggest-ever Thanksgiving blockbuster: $221 million domestically over the holiday corridor. The animated sequel to 2016’s Polynesian-inspired princess-on-a-mission fantasia surpassed The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($205.6 million) to log the biggest five-day total to date, shattering prerelease “tracking” estimates in the $125 million and $145 million range and drowning Walt Disney Animation Studios’ previous record holder (Frozen II’s $130 million three-day opening) in the process.
That outcome is all the more spectacular — demigodlike, even — considering the first Moana was hardly a ticket-sales sensation. That $150 million origin story (which featured original songs written by Lin-Manuel Miranda) did middling numbers theatrically but metamorphosed into a legit kids’-flick juggernaut, becoming the most-streamed movie across all platforms last year. And while Moana’s follow-up was originally intended as a limited series for Disney+ (a measure of the studio’s low faith in its IP), during a quarterly earnings call in February, the House of Mouse announced a sequel would be navigating into choppy waters at the multiplex. “Moana 2 has far surpassed our high expectations this weekend and is a testament to the phenomenon that Moana has become,” Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman remarked in a statement this past weekend.
Executives on Dopey Drive, however, were hardly the only Hollywood suits giving thanks over the holiday weekend. “Glicked” remained a potent cultural force as both of its constituent movies entered their second week of combined release. Broadway-musical adaptation–Wizard of Oz prequel–Hydra-headed-branded tie-in and merch machine Wicked enchanted audiences to the tune of $117.5 million (pushing its global cume to nearly $360 million) for the third-biggest Thanksgiving take on record. And Paramount’s swords-and-sandals epic, Gladiator II, continued to overcome its mixed reviews and wild historical incongruities to hack off $111.2 million at the domestic box office ($320 million globally), already ranking it among director Ridley Scott’s most lucrative films.
Bottle pee–er Dwayne Johnson, who voices the boisterous South Pacific super-human Maui in Moana 2, logged two movies in the top five over the weekend; his Amazon MGM Christmas-on-creatine action flick, Red One, came in a distant fourth with $18.7 million in North American receipts. And the Wicked–Gladiator II–Moana 2 trifecta resulted in a combined box-office revenue of more than $425 million, laying waste to the previous Thanksgiving-weekend record of $316 million set in 2018 (the three movies accounted for 75 percent of all showtimes, according to the cinema-data firm the Boxoffice Company).
While Moana 2 has managed to deliver a fresh but not that fresh 65 percent on the Tomatometer (with critics lamenting its “general flatness” and a perfunctory sequelitis), its overperformance arrives as a capstone to a superlative-packed year for Disney. The Burbank-based studio is now responsible for 2024’s top-three domestic openings, with Moana 2 arriving on the heels of Inside Out 2 (which has taken in nearly $1.7 billion worldwide to date to become Pixar’s highest-grossing movie) and Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.3 billion, the most successful R-rated film of all time). Over Christmas, the House of Mouse may in all likelihood extend that hot streak with Mufasa: The Lion King, the photorealistic Barry Jenkins–directed musical-drama that manages to be both a sequel and a prequel to Disney’s 2019 remake of its animated 1994 smash The Lion King.
It’s no coincidence that all of these movies are franchises, reboots, and reimaginings of cherished titles that came before. And if there is one big takeaway from it all: Disney has inverted the aphorism “Success begets success” by exploiting its intellectual properties in increasingly successful ways. Come 2026 — a mere decade removed from its original, animated iteration — expect a live-action remake of Moana with the Rock in a muscle-bound bodysuit.
