Box Office: 'Moana 2' Sets Sail With $57.5 Million Wednesday For Likely $220 Million-Plus Holiday Debut Weekend

A half-assed sequel to their all-ass classic is another chance to learn the wrong lessons and forget why and how Iger's Disney became king of the tentpole mountaintop.

Moana 2, a retrofitted and abridged version of what was supposed to be a Disney+ episodic, earned $57.5 million on Wednesday. That includes $13.8 million in Tuesday previews, a record for a Thanksgiving weekend opener. The reviews are generally positive (69% on Rotten Tomatoes, but most of a bend-over-backward-to-justify a “fresh” rating variety), and an A- from CinemaScore isn’t precisely problematic, even noting the A scores for Inside Out 2 or Encanto. Auliʻi Cravalho is terrific per usual, but the film feels torn apart and stitched together with context, content and cohesion left on the cutting room floor. It’s not far off from the days when you’d get a VHS tape offering a few episodes of a given TV show recut and repacked as “a movie.”

But even that’s no excuse. Hot take: The two-part pilot of CBS’s The Flash was one of the best “comic book superhero movies” well into the early 2010s. Lacking halfway-decent songs, memorable villains and a coherent narrative, it’s more frustrating than terrible. The visuals are spectacular, and Moana herself gets a slew of iconic hero moments. Still, it does the Independence Day Resurgence/Pacific Rim: Uprising thing of rehashing the first film while teasing a new status quo that should have been *this* movie. Moana 2 is technically better than Wish, but it’s also not as trainwreck-fascinating. It’s closer in quality to the non-Disney animated films of the prior decade (Turbo, Angry Birds or Wonder Park) that allowed the Mouse House to conquer the tentpole arena.

I saw Moana II on Tuesday, deciding to pass on the Monday night presser in favor of a local multiplex showing 21 hours later with my kids in tow. While visually spectacular, and the Studio Movie Grill’s new brisket sandwich is a keeper, the theatrical Disney Animation sequel plays like a direct-to-video Disney animation sequel, albeit with tentpole-sized visuals, theatrical production values and *without* Dan Castellaneta subbing in for Dwayne Johnson. It’s closer in quality to Brother Bear 2 than The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, which I suppose is a compliment. But I’d be lying if I argued that A) it was as thoughtful and entertaining as Aladdin and the King of Thieves and B) it wasn’t another scared-of-its-own shadow follow-up akin to Inside Out 2.

Disney continues to earn the most for doing the “least.”

Of course, that film earned $1.69 billion worldwide despite being a warmed-over rehash of the first film. That also means Disney and Pixar could not have (allegedly/reportedly) forced the animators to work overtime to make Riley less gay and withstood a (theoretical) hit on account of whatever discontent such G-rated flirtations might have inspired while still probably becoming the first or second-biggest grossing animated movie of all time. The problem is that the stuff that was at least trying to be on the level of Disney’s 2010s triumphs, some of which (Encanto, Soul, Turning Red) outright succeeded, were either moronically sent to Disney+ as cannon fodder in a doomed streaming war or had their theatrical releases compromised by a focus on “all our eggs in the streaming basket.”

Strange World — which offered a gay teen protagonist and committed to the sacrificial finale that Frozen II avoided — and Raya and the Last Dragon were at least going for it. Lightyear, commercially idiotic as it was, offered a loose redo of The Black Hole and a pointed perils-of-nostalgia narrative that doubled as a parable for Pixar’s animators reckoning with the circumstances of John Lasseter’s departure. However, Disney seems to act as if the likes of Soul, Turning Red and Encanto got standard theatrical releases and thus were traditional “lessons to be learned” box office bombs. These “nothing bad, but also nothing good” sequels like Inside Out 2 and Moana 2 are now getting to “rescue” the company and the box office, which isn’t precisely an aspirational circumstance.

The sky-high debut of Moana II is due to the (justified) popularity of the first Moana, making this an old-school breakout sequel. Beyond its initial theatrical success, Moana spent the last five years as the most-watched movie on Disney+. Unless it crashes Twilight Saga: Eclipse-level hard ($158 million from a $67 million Wednesday in July of 2010), and that’s doubtful even if my kids were as cranky about it as I was, it’ll pass $200 million by Sunday. Even legs like Rent (3.7x its $4.3 million opening day in 2005) still get Moana 2 to $213 million by day five. However, compared to the previous record holder ($18.3 million for Ralph Breaks the Internet in 2018), the sheer size of that Wednesday gross should be considered.

A towering (commercial) achievement…

Even legs like Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur ($55 million from a $9.7 million Wednesday in 2015) and DreamWorks’ Penguins of Madagascar ($35 million from a $6 million Wednesday ten years ago) get it to… uh… over $325 million. So, yeah, we’re probably looking at a Rent-like multiplier just based on the sheer size of the opening day. Last year, audiences renounced their Wish (nailed it) for an awful $32 million opening and 3.9x Wed-Sun multiplier. That would still give Moana 2 a $225 million five-day launch. Even Strange World earned $19 million from a $4 million Wednesday in 2022. The bonkers-bananas best-case scenario is likely a multiplier on par with Knives Out ($41 million/$8.5 million in 2019), giving Moana 2 a $284 million five-day debut.

For what it’s worth, Moana fell 36% on Thanksgiving day; The Good Dinosaur fell 33%, while Coco and Tangled fell 32%. But Frozen, even in the face of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’s $109 million Wed-Sun second weekend, fell just 27% on its second day. We can expect a 50-55% drop today, which under most circumstances would be “bad” but here is “Who gives a damn?” The sequel is about to demolish the previous Thanksgiving box office record books, besting the $93 million Wed-Sun debut of Frozen in 2013 and the $125 million Wed-Sun second weekend of Frozen II in 2019. It could also end up a day or three away from Moana’s $248 million domestic cume. That’s $308 million adjusted, but give it a week.

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 eat shit if Mufasa: The Lion King is even half as good as The Jungle Book (in Jenkins, we trust) and breathe a huge sigh of relief if Pixar’s Elio is a smash. Disney ruled the 2010s because they made toons as good as Zootopia. They are now “ruling” the 2020s because… they once made toons as good as Zootopia.