‘Wicked’ and ‘Gladiator II’ give Hollywood hope for strong holiday box office

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Wicked and Gladiator II jolted a sagging global box office back to life, with the two films taking in $385mn worldwide at the weekend, giving cinemas hope for a strong holiday season.

The hot streak is expected to continue as Disney’s Moana 2 debuts on Wednesday ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. Box office analysts say the films could deliver the best Thanksgiving period since 2018, a hopeful sign for cinemas that have still been unable to match attendance levels seen before the pandemic.

“This is shaping up to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest Thanksgiving [window] ever at the US box office,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior analyst at Comscore. “We’re going to have a 10-day period that could be close to $400mn” in the US, which would top the previous high of $315mn set in 2018.

Wicked won the weekend, debuting with $114mn in the US and $164.2mn globally, according to studio estimates. It was the third-biggest opening weekend of the year, behind the record-setting Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.

Wicked, a $145mn musical directed by Jon Chu and starring Ariana Grande, runs for two hours and 40 minutes. It is scheduled to be the first of two instalments chronicling the early life of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, performed by Cynthia Erivo.

Gladiator II, the Ridley Scott-directed, $250mn sequel to his Oscar-winning 2000 film that featured Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix, this weekend took in $55.5mn at the US box office — below some estimates. Running at almost two and a half hours, its worldwide total has reached $221mn.

The results will boost morale in Hollywood, which has yet to match pre-pandemic highs at the box office. The Hollywood strikes in 2023 left a hole in the release schedule for the first five months of the year. This summer was lifted by two Disney blockbusters, Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine, but until this weekend the only breakout hit had been Warner Bros’ comedy-horror sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, released on September 6.

By mid-November, the US box office was trailing last year’s Barbie and Oppenheimer-charged performance by 11 per cent.

Fans, or perhaps publicists, have come up with a “Barbenheimer”-like mash-up of Wicked and Gladiator II, but the result — “Glicked” — so far has not matched last year’s hype. But Hollywood executives are hoping the two films, plus a couple of strong releases around Christmas, will deliver a strong finish to the year that will carry over into 2025.

Disney, having scored the two highest-grossing films of the year, expects more success over the holidays. The Moana sequel comes eight years after the original, which grossed $643mn worldwide and has since become the most-streamed movie on any US service with more than 1bn hours on Disney+. 

Moana 2 — which had been planned as a streaming series for Disney+ before the studio decided to release it as a feature film instead — is forecast to gross about $135mn between its debut on Wednesday and Sunday in the US.

Disney is looking to cap its strong year with the release of Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20. The company’s famed movie studios hit a rough patch in 2022 and 2023, with lacklustre critical and box office reception to films by Marvel and Pixar. Bob Iger, after returning as chief executive, ordered the studios last year to focus on quality over quantity and reduced the number of releases.

“Disney didn’t have much in the way of big box office films over the past couple of years, with some mis-steps,” Dergarabedian said. “But now they’re back, and Moana 2 could give them their third billion-dollar performer released in this year.”