Every box-office record comes with a dozen provisos, but, by any measure, the staggering performance of last weekend’s biggest new movie is worthy of much wonderment. The result offers genuine evidence that there is a future for theatrical exhibition. Dig deeper and we learn about hitherto untapped markets. Dollar signs are lighting up eyes all over Hollywood.
No surprise. Wicked was a big Broadway hit and ... Let me stop you there. That film musical has done extremely well, particularly in the United States, but its figures are within expected parameters. All hail the phenomenon that is Moana 2. Disney’s respectably reviewed follow-up to its 2016 hit has blown Thanksgiving apart. Its $221 million US opening was the best five-day debut and the biggest five-day result for that holiday weekend. Blah-blah inflation? Blah-blah not really. That is about two and a half times what Frozen, the previous record holder, took a little over a decade ago.
Yes, but this is just an American thing. Right? Just look how skewed the Wicked figures are towards the “home” market. And Thanksgiving always gives films a huge bounce there. Right?
First, it is just two years since the respected film site IndieWire, reporting on Disney’s utterly forgotten Strange World, identified “the worst Thanksgiving weekend in box-office History”. A year later, as (them again) Disney’s Wish bombed, Variety was again bemoaning the “one of the worst” box-office Thanksgivings “in modern history”. So Thanksgiving success is not guaranteed.
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Second, Moana 2 is huge everywhere. It had the biggest global opening ever for an animated movie. It took that record in France and – more on this in a minute – secured the biggest opening for a Disney animation in Latin America. It has outpaced Wicked and Gladiator II to land in the year’s top 10 and will surely rise close to the top spot.
All this may surprise casual fans of mainstream animation. Everyone knows about Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Anyone who had a child in first decade of the century will have the songs from Frozen tattooed on their brain. But Moana? Many will class that Polynesian adventure, if they class it at all, with vaguely remembered family cartoons such as The Croods or Big Hero 6. Sure enough, though it made decent money, the film comes in at only 34 on the list of highest-grossing animated features.
Yet the folks at Disney were already aware a phenomenon was brewing. Just as Moana 2 was landing, news emerged that the original was the most streamed movie of the past five years. To be clear, Moana is the most streamed across all platforms. When you consider that Netflix has over 100 million more subscribers than Disney+, where Moana resides, that figure becomes weirder still.
It seems that, by the start of this year, the executives had twigged and set to turning around a tanker. In February Bob Iger, Disney’s chief executive, announced that a Moana TV series, in development since 2020, would be reshaped into a theatrical sequel. “We were impressed with what we saw and knew it deserved a theatrical release,” he said.
Few doubt that the streaming figures for the predecessor also played a factor. It had become clear that if they kept the sequel to the small screen they risked leaving a fortune on the table. Disney has history here. A full quarter of a century ago, Toy Story 2, eventually among Pixar’s most admired films, began life as a direct-to-video project before the Mouse House, already the digital studio’s owner, elected to move it into cinemas.
What explains the rise of Moana? Lin Manuel Miranda’s songs are terrific, and, with a “singalong” option on Disney+, there is endless potential to drive parents insane. But you could say the same of Frozen. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, who voices the massive shape-shifter Maui, has a stubborn fan base among all ages. But he has had his share of flops.
One undeniable factor is its focus on people of colour. Moana herself looks unlike the majority of Disney princesses who have preceded her. Early figures for Moana 2 in North America show audiences were 36 per cent Hispanic and Latino, 27 per cent black and 11 per cent Asian-American. All those figures are well above the percentages for those groups in the general population. It appears, to paraphrase a chant of tedious reactionaries, that go woke and you won’t go broke.
The only thing stopping Moana 2 going all the way to the top of the 2024 chart is the staggering success of its stablemate Inside Out 2. With $1.7 billion in the bag, the Pixar film is the eighth-highest grosser ever. Family films are still huge. Animations are still huge. Sequels are still huge. Something has to keep the lights on.
