Box Office: Disney's 'Moana 2' Nabs $221M Domestic And $386M Global Debut

Hot take - I'm reasonably sure that 'Moana 2' is going to make more money as a theatrical sequel than it would have as a Disney+ streaming show. Crazy, I know...

If Moana 2 were opening this weekend with $221 million, or even $117 million, that alone would be a spectacular result. If Wicked Part One were opening this weekend with $80 million over the Fri-Sun frame of a $117.5 million Wed-Sun holiday haul, that by itself would be a record-breaker. But for Moana 2 to be sailing to $135.5 million over the Fri-Sun portion of a $221 million Wed-Sun domestic debut while Wicked Part One concurrently earns $80 million/$117.5 million in its *second* weekend is frankly astonishing. Again, this would have been spectacular in pre-COVID or pre-streaming times. Four years ago, The Croods: A New Age was the top movie of the holiday, making up $14 million of a $20 million Wed-Sun cumulative domestic box office total. Today we’re looking at a Wed-Sun gross of around $420 million just in North America.

Moana 2 earned more in its Fri-Sun domestic debut than Frozen 2 earned in its non-opening $125 million Wed-Sun Thanksgiving gross in 2019. Inflation notwithstanding, it opened 2.35x higher than Frozen ($94 million) in 2013, which was the previous biggest Thanksgiving opener. To be fair, most of the last 24 years saw a top-tier pre-Thanksgiving YA fantasy flick opening huge and then legging out over the holiday alongside whatever big Disney movie (be it Coco or The Muppets) was offered up over the actual holiday weekend. This year, that was Wicked Part One, but more on that later. It’s the third-biggest Fri-Sun debut of the year behind Inside Out 2 ($155 million) and Deadpool & Wolverine ($211 million), and the Wed-Sun gross eclipsed Universal and Illimination’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie ($204 million in 2023) as the biggest Wed-Sun five-day launch ever.

Moana 2 has already topped the lifetime domestic grosses of Disney and/or Pixar Thanksgiving openers like Coco, Tangled and Ralph Breaks the Internet. The animated sequel, which was a retrofitted and abridged version of what was supposed to be a Disney+ episodic, earned $386 million in its global debut. The sky-high debut of Moana 2 is mostly due to the (justified) popularity of the first Moana, making this an old-school breakout sequel. Beyond its initial $248 million domestic and $643 million worldwide theatrical run in late 2016, Moana spent the last five years as the most-watched movie on Disney+. Its Wed-Sun legs were closer to Wish than Coco, but it opened seven times larger than last Thanksgiving’s Disney dud. The film earned an A- from CinemaScore, lower than the A grades for Encanto and Inside Out 2, but nabbed 4.5/5 from PostTrak.

Even post-Thanksgiving weekend legs like Wish ($64 million from a $32 million Wed-Sun debut last year) get Moana 2 to $442 million in North America. More plausibly, legs like Ralph Breaks the Internet ($201 million/$85 million in 2018) or The Good Dinosaur ($123 million/$55 million in 2015) still get it to between $495 million and $525 million. It could obviously leg out closer to Coco ($210 million/$73 million in 2017) and flirt with $645 million, but A) this is a far larger opening weekend and B) there’s a ton of kid-friendly competition between now (Wicked Part One and Red One) and the end of the year (Mufasa: The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog 3). Again, the “debate” is whether it ends up closer to Finding Dory, The Lion King (the remake) or Inside Out 2. This is very much a “win/win” situation.

So… yay for theaters? Theatrical has become so imperiled by a pandemic and then by a self-defeating streaming war that any film ending up in conventional theatrical release now qualifies as a situational victory. That Disney has propped up this year at its most “Remember those 2010s movies you loved… even the Fox ones we didn’t even make?” timid feels like an insult to injury. I’ll happily presume that Mufasa: The Lion King is even half as good as The Jungle Book (in Jenkins, we trust), and I’ll hope that the sky-high box office for animated sequels will help make Pixar’s Elio a proper summer smash. However, even my kids thought Moana 2 was a shadow of its predecessor. Disney ruled the 2010s because they made original toons as good as Coco. They are now “ruling” the 2020s because… they once made original toons as good as Coco.

I will always be steamed that Disney sent a bunch of high-quality originals to Disney+ (Soul, Luca, Turning Red) or into theaters (Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto, Strange World) amid market pressures that favored streaming consumption only to act like the end result was that originals were risky, inclusively was the risk and that (thus far) flavorless nostalgia-targeting sequels were the way to go. However, Elio can still right that ship. It’s also worth remembering that Inside Out 2, Moana 2 and even Alien Romulus began life as straight-to-streaming “content.” If Bob Iger and friends can see the value of theatrical release over a streaming-exclusive debut, then perhaps — seven years after the last original toon (Coco) to crack $500 million — they will also remember that you can’t score a $386 million worldwide opening weekend from Moana 2 unless you first roll the dice on Moana.