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A trio of film releases — Wicked, Gladiator II and Disney’s Moana 2 — are expected to jolt a sagging US box office back to life over the next week, giving cinemas hope for a strong holiday season.
Universal’s Wicked and Paramount’s Gladiator II opened this weekend to good reviews, and Moana 2 will debut on Wednesday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. Box office analysts say the films could deliver the best Thanksgiving period since 2018, a hopeful sign for cinemas that have still been unable to match attendance levels seen before the pandemic.
“This is shaping up to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest Thanksgiving [window] ever at the US box office,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Comscore. “We’re going to have a 10-day period that could be close to $400mn” in the US, which would top the previous high of $315mn set in 2018.
So far, it has been another difficult year for cinemas. The Hollywood strikes in 2023 left a hole in the release schedule for the first five months of the year. This summer was lifted by two Disney blockbusters, Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, but the only breakout hit since then has been Warner Bros’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, released on September 6. By mid-November, the US box office was trailing last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer-charged performance by 11 per cent.
Fans, or perhaps publicists, have come up with a “Barbenheimer”-like mash-up of Wicked and Gladiator II, but the result — “Glicked” — has not matched last year’s hype. Still, Wicked, a $145mn musical directed by Jon Chu and starring Ariana Grande, is forecast to gross $100mn in North American cinemas this weekend.
The film, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is scheduled to be the first of two instalments chronicling the early life of the Wicked Witch of the West, performed by Cynthia Erivo.
Gladiator II, the Ridley Scott-directed, $250mn sequel to his Oscar-winning 2000 film featuring Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix, is expected to take in $65mn at the US box office this weekend. Running at almost two and a half hours, it earned $87mn outside the US last week.
If Wicked and Gladiator perform as expected, “it will give a great morale boost and revenue boost” to cinemas, Dergarabedian said.
Disney, having scored the two highest-grossing films of the year, is hoping for more success over the holidays. The Moana sequel comes eight years after the original, which grossed $643mn worldwide and has since become the most-streamed movie on any US service with more than 1bn hours on Disney+.
Moana 2 — planned as a streaming series for Disney+ before the studio decided to release it as a feature film instead — is forecast to gross about $135mn between its debut on Wednesday and Sunday in the US.
Disney is looking to cap its strong year with the release of Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20. The company’s famed movie studios hit a rough patch in 2022 and 2023, with lacklustre critical and box office reception to films by Marvel and Pixar. Bob Iger, after returning as chief executive, ordered the studios last year to focus on quality over quantity and reduced the number of releases.
“Disney didn’t have much in the way of big box office films over the past couple of years, with some mis-steps,” Dergarabedian said. “But now they’re back, and Moana 2 could give them their third billion-dollar performer released in this year.”
