Box Office: 'Wicked' Nabs $20M Wednesday as 'Gladiator II' Earns $6.6M And 'Red One' Shows Holiday Muscle

'Moana 2' is accounting for around 64% of the day's total even as holdovers hold firm alongside the Disney sequel for what looks to be a record Thanskgiving weekend.

For all the non-Moana 2 Wednesday box office news…

Not to be entirely outdone by the Disney juggernaut, Universal’s Wicked Part One earned another $20.4 million (+20% from its $16.6 million Tuesday) to bring its six-day domestic total to $165 million. It has earned 1.47x its $112.5 million opening weekend, a higher “weekend to day six” multiplier than any pre-Thanksgiving YA fantasy flick. Thus far, it’s still leggier than any “Wizarding World” movie, Twilight follow-up, or Hunger Games sequel. All had around 1.3x their Fri-Sun debuts heading into Thanksgiving, ditto the one-off likes of The Grinch in 2000 and Justice League in 2017. Even The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had earned 1.43x its $44.6 million debut and Frozen II had notched 1.44x its $130 million launch. If it continues to hold firm, Jon M. Chu’s $145 million musical will notch a $63 million (-44%) Fri-Sun and a $92 million Wed-Sun total.

That will be close to the $109 million five-day Thanksgiving weekend total of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 2013, with a better second-weekend hold, alongside Frozen’s “mere” (compared to where Moana 2 might end up day five) $93 million Wed-Sun wide release debut. It will also bring the film’s domestic total to $242 million in ten days. Even if it continues to underwhelm overseas, that would still be around $351 million worldwide in just under two weeks of global play. Like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the Cynthia Erivo/Ariana Grande-led fantasy is so aggressively performing to best-case-scenario business in North America that a softer-than-hoped overseas run is almost irrelevant. Barring a collapse on par with a Twilight sequel (which, after day ten, would still net Wicked Part One a $313 million domestic finish), the only question is how much domestic gravity the film eventually defies over the next month or so.

Paramount’s Gladiator II earned another $6.6 million on Wednesday (-1% from Tuesday) to bring its six-day domestic cume to $73.8 million. Ridley Scott’s legacy sequel should earn around $27 million (-51%) over the Fri-Sun portion of a $38.5 million holiday haul. That will give the $250 million actioner (which is kicking ass overseas) a $106 million ten-day domestic total. If the Wicked Witch is positioning herself as The Boy Who Lived, then Gladiator Jr. is performing like this season’s Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Going back to GoldenEye in 1995, almost every 007 movie has opened a week or two before Thanksgiving. And now Gladiator II is cosplaying as Tomorrow Never Dies (which opened just before Christmas in December of 1997) as Wicked, and Moana 2 duke it out over which tentpole gets to be Titanic and which one is Scream 2, relatively speaking.

Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig’s respective Bond dramas thrived alongside the various youth-skewing and/or fantasy tentpoles. Positioned alongside the various Harry Potter/Twilight/Hunger Games/Middle Earth flicks and the likes of Toy Story, Sleepy Hollow, Happy Feet and The Force Awakens, the likes of The World is Not Enough, Casino Royale and Spectre positioned themselves he court-appointed year-end big-deal tentpole for older and less fantastically-inclined audiences. Skyfall legged out to $304 million domestically and $1.1 billion worldwide as the “only super-sized game in town” in late 2012, alongside the fan-specific Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn 2 ($829 million) and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ($1 billion). If I’m somewhat bullish on Gladiator II’s post-Thanksgiving legs, it’s because it’s the only big-scale action flick (all due respect to Kraven The Hunter and Den of Thieves 2) until Paddington In Peru Captain America: Brave New World drops on Valentine’s Day.

Red One started to show some holiday muscle, earning $2.8 million on Wednesday for a likely $12 million (-9%) Fri-Sun and $17.3 million Wed-Sun gross. That will give Amazon MGM Studios’ $250 million (greenlit for streaming) holiday action comedy a $75 million 17-day total. If it can leg out over December and put up domestic numbers - think $100-$150 million - on par with Dwayne Johnson’s ($80-$130 million-budgeted) 2010s star vehicles Rampage, San Andreas and Central Intelligence, this might qualify as a face-saving domestic performance. Speaking of which, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is living up to its title, with $850,000 on Wednesday for what could be a $3.35 million (+3%) Fri-Sun and $5.14 million Wed-Sun gross. That will give the Judy Greer star vehicle a $32.3 million 24-day total, days away from passing The Strangers Chapter 1 ($35 million) as Lionsgate’s biggest 2024 grosser.

Okay, the rest of the scuttlebutt can wait since it will be a long weekend (literally, not in terms of peril and pain, natch). But we’ll get a record-breaking overall Thanksgiving weekend, with five-day totals leapfrogging past the $314 million totals from 2018 and possibly flirting with $400 million overall. Fun fact: Thanksgiving 2020 was just $20 million overall, with $14 million coming from The Croods: A New Era. Come what may, I’m obviously thankful to the readers and subscribers and active participants on this site as it nears its one-year-anniversary. Along with that (and the usual friends/family/health/etc.), I’m thankful that the theatrical industry has recovered enough (partially via studios finally bothering to release a bunch of movies of all shapes and sizes, even alongside mega-bucks tentpoles) that I can bitch and moan about a mediocre Disney sequel soaring to infinity and beyond.