Thanksgiving 2025

At this point it looks like this Holiday Weekend is going to play out about how I thought it was going to play out, but with one interesting shortfall. Moana 2 gave us the biggest Thanksgiving opening of all time last year (and more than doubled the previous record holder, Moana); so as good as the IP is on Zootopia, it’s no Moana, but we expected that. And yes, we’re missing the gross Gladiator II brought in last year ($31 million for 3 days), but I thought we would only be off last year’s 3 day total by about 10%, which would align with the missing Gladiator gross, and right now it looks closer to 20%. The extra shortfall looks like it’s tied to what Wicked For Good is looking like right now, it’s actually running behind where Wicked was at the same point on the day before Thanksgiving. So where we thought we would be missing some revenue from one less Gladiator II, it looks like the drop is going to be a little more severe this weekend on Wicked For Good than it was for week 2 on Wicked as well.

Why is Wicked For Good, which grossed about 30% more than Wicked last weekend, look like it’s going to do less than Wicked did in weekend 2? They lost a lot of their PLF’s to Zootopia 2, and they now have a similar footprint with the PLF’s as they had last year. So when you look at what Wicked For Good is probably going to do this weekend (based on what I’m seeing now), it’s closer to the 10% drop we usually see on sequels off the gross of the previous version.
And that might strengthen the point I was making last week, that as much as we look at competitive landscape when we’re dating films in regards to genre and audience skew, the PLF self space might be more important.

Anyway, with a similar accuracy as drunken calls to the Butterball Hotline just to fuck with them*, here are some thoughts on the weekend box-office.

Zootopia 2 - It will be fun to see how the entertainment press treats this film over the weekend, and how ‘glass half empty’ they go. As I said above, this is looking like it’s a decent amount less than Moana 2 was last year, but they’ll probably ignore that this ain’t Moana. Moana is and has been (by far) the most popular title on the Disney + platform, and Zootopia is pretty good, but it’s no Moana. But if you look at this weekend before Moana 2, this is going to beat all those films by a large margin, so by any measure it’s a monster.

However, going back to glass half empty, one can only imagine what this (and Moana 2) could have been. Back in early 2024, when Moana 2 and Wicked were both scheduled to be released on the day before Thanksgiving, most level headed folks in the business knew the smart move was to move up to the Friday before and go against Gladiator II. Since Moana 2 was by far the bigger fish, and Disney’s best result in the time period was with Frozen II on the Friday before Thanksgiving, everyone figured they would move. But we waited and waited and nothing happened, and then Universal smartly said, okay cool, we’ll do it (oddly enough, the hangup was working out the PLF situation). And a messenger with an oval white name tag walked a bag with a couple of hundred million dollars down Alameda and dropped at Gate 1 on Lankershim. But because Universal had two Wicked films, they smartly made the same move on Wicked For Good, and now Zootopia 2 is dealing with Wicked For Good the same way the Moana 2 was suppressed a little by the runaway success of Wicked. Of course, we’re talking about a couple of hundred million dollars here, and all three of these are billion dollar IP’s so kind of like complaining that the sound system is a little ‘bright’ in a Rolls Royce.

This looks really good and the 3 day should end up around $90 million, with a 5 day around $140 million.

Wicked For Good - What’s interesting about the grosses today vs last year is that once Moana 2 opened, Wicked was still really strong on the coasts and Moana 2 crushed Wicked in the flyover states, so they kind of had different audience skews. It doesn’t look that way today and it looks like there’s way more commonality of audience today than last year. That could be one of the reasons this film looks like it’s going to be down about 50% from last week, instead of the 28% it was down in week 2 on Wicked. But at this point it’s running about 10% behind where Wicked was running, which would put the 3 day in the low 70’s and the 5 day a little above 100.

Eternity - A24 went 1300 runs today and the grosses look very A24, really good in NY, LA and Austin; then they soften pretty quickly as you get farther into the burbs. Looks like a 3 day of about $2 million and a 5 day of about $3 million.

Hamnet - Went a little over 100 runs in 20 or so markets, and it’s a decent start. It’s much better in places that know who Chloe Zhao, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley are and it’s pretty soft where they don’t. But as many of you have heard, the film plays really strong and this could be the seed of something that could be around for a while. These films are a little hard to call at this point in the holiday weekend, but as a hipshot I’ll say about $1.1 million for the 3 day and $1.6 or so for the 5 day.

The Secret Agent - Went exclusive in NY at the Film Society and the Angelika. As of now the Film Society is pretty good and the Angelika is a little soft, but as another hipshot I’ll say it’s a 3 day psa in the high 20’s and a 5 day in the mid 40’s.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery - Back in 2022, we were so desperate for any film over Thanksgiving, Netflix decided to take a shot at Theatrical and released Glass Onion in about 600 theaters, and some of the majors like AMC played it (they were really desperate). It did pretty good, but apparently Netflix felt it was too off-brand to do it this time (plus the majors aren’t desperate this year). What should be interesting though is now we have two takes on the same IP, one had a pretty robust (for Netflix) theatrical break, and one had the usual Netflix release that’s a Theatrical version of a self published novel. But what if the viewership on the platform is vastly different, and the one that went Theatrical has longer legs than the usual platform ‘one week and then bye bye’ viewership arc? Might be interesting to monitor.

Everyone have a great Thanksgiving!

• and I’ve possibly been part of that hijinx.