After November started off with three lackluster premiere weekends (yes, even Red One), it concluded with absolute bangers. It started with the Glicked combo last week, giving the box office the best weekend since the opening of Deadpool & Wolverine. This week theaters were overrun on Thanksgiving and continued into the third $200+ million weekend of 2024. This year has certainly had its ups and downs and Chicken Little moments in regards to theatrical attendance, but when it counted, audiences showed up to generate the best weekend since the pandemic.
Disney was planning to release Moana: The Series on Disney+. Somewhere along the way, someone remembered that Moana: The Movie was a huge success both domestically ($248.7 million) and worldwide ($643.3 million), numbers that an original Disney animated film (not from Pixar) hasn’t seen since. And if the box office has taught us anything, making sequels to those types of movies are usually gold mines. So out with the episodic Moana and in with the refashioning into a feature film. While the results have not exactly enraptured critics, families and fans of Moana gave Thanksgiving its best box office weekend ever.
Back in 2013, the high bar was set with another sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which finished the five-day holiday with $109.9 million, besting the $82.3 million earned back in 2001 by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Even more impressive, both of those films were in their second weekend. Catching Fire also edged out a little film opening that weekend called Frozen ($93.5 million). That original Disney animated film got its revenge in 2019 when its sequel ended its second weekend with $125 million over the five-day stretch and became the biggest Thanksgiving No. 1 of all time. Moana 2 said “hold my kava” and opened with $135.5 million, just from Friday to Sunday; the five-day stretch is estimated at $221 million.
Not only is that a new Thanksgiving record, but it’s also the 13th-best five-day start for a film ever behind Incredibles 2 ($233.3 million) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ($227 million), and ahead of Avengers: Age of Ultron ($217.6 million) and Barbie ($214.1 million). Among the 23 films to open with $200+ million in their first five days, only one of them, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, finished below $400 million with $381 million, and only five more finished with less than half a billion domestic (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Avengers: Age of Ultron). Only Transformers, Black Panther, and Doctor Strange from that list also missed the billion-dollar mark worldwide. Moana 2 is already at $386 million and hoping to join Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine on that list for 2024.