Battle at the Box Office 12/16/24
Moana 2 and Wicked remained at the top of the box office charts this past weekend as the two big new releases hit all-time lows for their respective franchises.
Moana 2 took in another $26.6 million, bringing its domestic total to $337.5 million and $717 million worldwide. It’s currently the fifth highest-grossing film domestically for 2024 and the fourth biggest film worldwide. It’s currently fourth all-time for Walt Disney Animation Studios behind Frozen, Frozen II, and Zootopia.
Wicked dropped only 38% from last weekend and made another $22.6 million domestically, taking its domestic gross to $359.1 million. However, it’s not quite hitting worldwide as strong as it is domestically, and its worldwide gross is $525.3 million.
Kraven the Hunter did the “best” of the new releases but was still a massive flop with only $11 million for its opening weekend. That’s the lowest opening ever for Sony’s Marvel Universe, below the already terrible opening that Madame Web had earlier this year and significantly below the Venom movies and Morbius. It was equally bad worldwide, with a total gross of $26 million. The movie also got a C CinemaScore from audiences, so expect this to crash and burn out of the top 10 rapidly.
Gladiator II dropped to third with another $7.6 million, reaching $145.7 million domestically and $398.3 million worldwide.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim opened in fifth place with $4.5 million, the lowest opening the The Lord of the Rings franchise. It is the first theatrically released animated film set in Middle-Earth but it feels like a similar thing that the Transformers franchise ran into with Transformers One, which vastly underperformed compared to the previous entries in the franchise. The War of the Rohirrim did about the same as this year’s Demon Slayer theatrical release, but that was in significantly fewer theaters and was a limited-time event. Audiences gave The War of the Rohirrim a B CinemaScore, but most people will probably wait a few months and watch it on Max.
Further down the list, the re-release of Interstellar added more theaters and took in another $3.6 million. Queer expanded into 460 theaters and took 10th place with $790,954.
The per-Theater average went to Nickel Boys, which made $27,397 in each of the two theaters it played in.
