Ariana DeBose stars as Asha in Disney’s recent animated film “Wish.”
Disney
Disney must do greater than wish on some stars to get out of its animation rut.
Its latest animated feature “Wish,” billed as a celebration of 100 years of storytelling, fumbled at the box office during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. It tallied just $31.6 million over the five-day period, far below box office analysts’ expectations of between $45 million and $55 million.
Lionsgate’s “Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” took the top spot for the five-day holiday, generating $42.2 million in ticket sales. Apple and Sony’s “Napoleon,” an R-rated war epic from Ridley Scott, got here in second with $32.75 million.
It’s historically rare for Disney to lag at the Thanksgiving box office. The corporate has for greater than a decade released top-grossing animated movies during the Wednesday-to-Sunday frame and even set records for highest-grossing openings for movies released on Thanksgiving.
But it surely’s struggled since the pandemic to encourage moviegoers to move to cinemas for its newest features.
“A set it and forget it strategy based on past performance can now not be employed by any studio,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. “There are some hard lessons being learned as this confounding movie marketplace continues to re-write the rules and audiences make their preferences known with either their presence or the absence at the multiplex.”
The underperformance of “Wish” extends an unlucky pattern for the company, which operates two animation studios — Walt Disney Animation and Pixar.
Much of Disney’s trouble has come from executive decisions to pad its fledgling streaming service Disney+ with content, stretching its creative teams thin and sending theatrical movies during the pandemic straight to digital.
Parents, confused about when and where animated movies were being released, didn’t show as much as theaters for a variety of titles from Disney in the wake of the pandemic. And plenty of of those movies weren’t well-received by those that did.
Then there’s the added pressures of shareholders who’ve develop into focused on the profitability of Disney+, tight marketing budgets and audiences which have develop into more selective about when and what they exit to see at cinemas.
Disney, which ruled the animation genre for many years, can also be facing steep competition from Netflix, Universal, Sony and Warner Bros., amongst others, for moviegoers’ attention. Just every week before “Wish” hit theaters, Universal’s DreamWorks animation studio released “Trolls Band Together,” the third installment in the popular Trolls franchise.
“Trolls Band Together” secured $25.6 million in ticket sales during the five-day Thanksgiving frame, just a number of million shy of “Wish.” Box office analysts consider “Trolls” ate into “Wish” ticket sales.
“Entering a marketplace with a well-known ‘Trolls’ movie already in the mix was a recipe for a lower than stellar result for the company’s latest release,” Dergarabedian said.
Still, the story of “Wish” is not done. Disney has found success over the run of a theatrical release for movies like “Elemental,” which tallied just $29.6 million during its domestic opening, but went on to secure nearly $480 million globally before leaving theaters.
Similarly, “Encanto” snared $40.3 million for the five-day Thanksgiving period in 2021. Even though it captured lower than $250 million globally during the pandemic, it found recent life on Disney+. The film quickly became a fan favorite with kids and adults alike, who gravitated towards catchy tunes like “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.”
“‘Wish’ fortunately has the December holiday family moviegoing corridor and after all a future on Disney+ to bolster its fortunes,” said Dergarabedian.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal distributed “Trolls Band Together.”