By Chad W. Shreeves

The Thanksgiving holiday is now over. There was a question of if last weekend’s historic box office was a fluke or not. Well, just a week later and audiences have responded.

Overall, it was a good weekend, but did feature several notable drops. This was expected, as many of the films had a bigger than anticipated holiday haul. It’s also a bit of a lull week, with ‘Wicked’ and ‘Gladiator II’ in their third weekends. It is still a couple weeks out from the giant holiday hits like ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’.

Disney’s animated juggernaut ‘Moana 2’ held on to its top spot with an estimated gross of $52 million. This is a solid 63% drop roughly from its 3 day opening weekend last week. That’s an average drop and pretty good for a film that opened well above expectations. The musical sequel also crossed the $600 million mark worldwide. This elevated the film to a top five highest grossing films of 2024 already. At this point, ‘Moana 2’ is poised to be the third film of the year to cross the billion dollar mark.

Hot off the heals of its National Board of Review win, ‘Wicked’ remained in second place with an estimated $34.9 million. In its third weekend, the musical smash hit based off of the Broadway play of the same name appears to be running out of steam. But given its huge grosses in the first two weekends, that does not come at a surprise either. It’s currently sitting at $455 million worldwide.

‘Gladiator II’ continued its run with an estimated $12.5 million run. The historical epic still lags behind the big musicals, but has crossed into profitability. It’s now standing at $368 million worldwide and is expected to also continue a strong streak through the remainder of the holidays.

The only major release from the weekend was A24’s horror comedy Y2K, which managed to underperform with only $2.1 million, failing to crack the top five of the weekend. It became a maligned title on social media, with a 43% critics rating and a 52% audience rating.

Next week is light, with the anime-inspired ‘Lord of the Rings’ prequel ‘The War of the Rohirrim’ and Sony’s next entry in their struggling Spider-Man-less Villain universe, ‘Kraven the Hunter’. Neither will be expected to perform well. ‘Kraven’ is expected to follow a long line of critical and box office failures for the Studio. ‘War of the Rohirrim’ is already struggling, failing to gain an audience overseas.

Box office numbers sourced from Boxofficemojo.

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