Disney and Universal Can Help Each Other By Avoiding Silly Box Office Showdowns

There's no reason beyond pride for A) Universal's 'Wicked' to open on the same day as Disney's 'Moana 2' or B) Pixar's 'Elio' to open concurrently with DreamWorks' 'How to Train Your Dragon' remake.

With Inside Out 2 racing past $800 million worldwide by tomorrow, there’s reason to be a bit more bullish on Disney’s other upcoming 2024 tentpoles, namely Moana 2 on November 27 and Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20. In both cases, there are also opposing kid-targeted tentpoles from rival studios on the same days.  I have no strong feelings about whether Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 should move to Christmas Day or even swap places with Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, which is currently set for November 22. Sonic 3 and prequel/sequel Lion King: Here We Go Again (or, noting Barry Jenkins’ earned prestige, The Lion King Part II) can both thrive amid the year-end holiday blitz with nothing else aimed at kids (sorry to you pint-sized Den of Thieves super fans) until Paddington in Peru in mid-January. But Universal’s Wicked Part I opening concurrently with Moana 2 is a Thanksgiving showdown that need not happen.  

That’s especially because there’s yet another kid-powered showdown scheduled for June 13, 2025, which also seems like a needless bit of same-day competition. The jaw-dropping $30 million Wednesday for Inside Out 2 showed the commercial moviegoing value of Juneteenth as a family-friendly multiplex holiday. But that doesn’t mean  Pixar’s Elio or Universal’s live-action How to Train Your Dragon can’t ditch the key mid-June weekend. Again, I have no strong thoughts on whether Sonic 3 (my son’s most anticipated movie of 2024 now that Godzilla x Kong has come and gone) should keep its date and hope Disney moves. However, there is an arrangement to be made between Universal and Disney. Simply put, if Universal agrees to move Wicked Part I to November 22 (after which Paramount should move the Paul Mescal/Denzel Washington-starring Gladiator sequel to November 15 in sync with its overseas rollout), then Disney will move Elio away from June 13. 

Why Universal should move Wicked part I to November 22 

Rather than being the other big-deal, family-friendly musical fantasy opening over the big family-focused movie of the year, Wicked Part I can open a week early and be that season’s court-appointed YA/fantasy/teen fantasy adventure film. Going back to 2001 (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) through 2023 (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes), the pre-Thanksgiving slot was occupied by a Wizarding World, Twilight or Hunger Games flick on 13 of those years. Concurrently, Disney had a big Thanksgiving release opening wide on Thanksgiving weekend on the semi-regular since Aladdin in 1992. However, both Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid went wide a week before the holiday frame in 1991 and 1989. But it’s been consistent from Tangled in 2010 onward since they f***ed up in 2009 by platforming The Frog Princess over the holiday only to debut wide in mid-December while we were all getting psyched for Avatar.  

Honestly, in most years, the YA flick “won” in terms of the overall global box office while often topping Thanksgiving weekend against the Disney toon opener. Still, both films tended to be relatively successful on their own merits. In 2019, Disney moved Frozen II to that mid-November weekend, shrewdly positioning the Anna/Elsa sequel as the season’s YA fantasy franchise flick and the Thanksgiving animated tentpole. But this year, Moana 2 will rely on 2010s nostalgia while (speculation alert due to its origins as a Disney+ episodic) skewing younger. Wicked Part I, while not remotely Dancer in the Dark-level grim, will be relying on slightly older kids and their parents while generating multigenerational nostalgia for an early 2003 stage show. There is zero reason beyond pride that Wicked Part I can’t open on November 22 as this year’s court-appointed pre-Thanksgiving YA fantasy blockbuster, while Moana 2 is the official holiday weekend Disney animated biggie. 

Why Disney should move Elio to June 19 

Even if moving Wicked Part I away from Moana 2 helps both films, there’s little reason Universal should just step aside without something in return. Disney should agree to move Elio, their upcoming Pixar original, from June 13 to June 6 (alongside the Ana De Armas-starring John Wick spin-off Ballerina) or June 20 (alongside Sony’s 28 Years Later). Slight correction: since we now know that Juneteenth is a big-deal multiplex holiday, they can open Elio on Thursday, June 19. Does this really “help” Elio beyond getting it away from a likely multigenerational nostalgia event? Not really, but they frankly have more flexibility. Dean DeBlois’s How to Train Your Dragon redo was partially shot using Imax cameras, so they need the already-promised Imax screens. Moreover, while they *could* move up a week, that would mean less Imax time and less overall time between the live-action remake and Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World 4 on July 2.  

Elio was initially slated for this March before it was delayed due to (among other variables) the SAG-AFTRA strike. The hope is that the goodwill accrued by Elemental last summer and the current blockbuster run for Inside Out 2 will have mostly acclimated audiences back into the habit of again showing up for Pixar films in theaters. And frankly, Elio has one of the easier elevator pitches for a Pixar *theatrical* newbie in a while. If the original sci-fi comedy, about a young boy who gets abducted by aliens and must cosplay “Encounter at Farpoint,” works as a crowd-pleasing Pixar original, it will be a relative hit no matter where it opens. Finding Nemo and Up opened in late May, Cars and Inside Out opened in mid-June, and Wall-E and Brave opened later in June. I’m too lazy to look up when Father’s Day fell each year, but you get the idea.  

Game Theory > Mutually Assured Destruction 

Again, this wouldn’t solve the “conflict” between Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (which will presumably be about Sonic getting displaced and losing his powers and thus having to rely on his smarts and instincts to show that his value comes from within) and Mufasa: The Lion King (presumably a sweeping saga contrasting the blood-drenched rise of a young Mufasa with the moral collapse of a now-grown Simba). Offhand, maybe Paramount moves Sonic 3 to Christmas Day in exchange for Disney not placing anything on May 23 (“untitled Disney movie”) alongside Mission: Impossible: But Ethan... What if Not Calling It Dead Reckoning Part II is What the Entity Wanted? After all, there is a difference between competition in a month or season and two demographically similar, must-succeed tentpoles opening on the same day out of spite. Remember, #Barbenheimer “happened” because Barbie and Oppenheimer were vastly different films targeting different audiences. Ditto, I suppose, #SawPatrol. 

It might be nice to still consider the theatrically focused studios as ruthless rivals who hope their films succeed while their competitors fail. Sadly, the industry is not healthy enough for that kind of cutthroat, zero-sum competition. With competition from at-home entertainment sources such as streaming and social media, along with overall competition from Wall Street-preferred tech powerhouses, Hollywood must play a little bit nice when the occasion arises. So, moving Wicked Part I and Elio off their chosen dates will help both films and their respective same-day competitors. The entire industry should now be playing out that one episode of every ‘80s cartoon where the good guys and the bad guys team up to fight drug dealers. To paraphrase Peter O’Toole and Brad Pitt in the (underrated) 20-year-old Troy, Disney, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony can still be enemies in the morning.