By Crishelle Christman
This past weekend, movie theaters saw their most successful box office weekend of 2024 and possibly the most successful Thanksgiving weekend box office of all time, with Moana 2, Gladiator 2, and Wicked all in theaters.
November 22nd marked the opening day of release for both Wicked and Gladiator 2, and both films had an incredibly successful weekend by post-pandemic box office performance standards. Wicked continued to perform well on Monday, bringing in $15.8 million, outperforming many other Monday performances of past Thanksgiving blockbuster releases, including Frozen II, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. While Wicked's success seemed to be a given due to its massive marketing campaign over the past year, its success is still an enormous achievement for a Broadway film adaptation and musical.
The Broadway and musical genre is notoriously divisive and tends to cater to a small audience, especially if not primarily catering to children and families. Very rarely do live-action musicals achieve the success Wicked is currently achieving; Mamma Mia! was the last musical (not primarily catered to children) to find overall success at the box office, grossing around $609 million at the global box office. However, most other non-animated musicals seem to peter out around the $500 million mark and below, so the longevity of Wicked's success remains to be seen.
It's worth noting that the success of Wicked could not have been achieved with its extensive marketing campaign alone, as the film had a lot of traction online with social media trends. Earlier in the year, Wicked, Gladiator 2, and Moana 2were all set to premiere in theaters on November 22nd. Ultimately, Disney chose to delay the release of Moana 2 by a week to avoid a mass box office battle and leverage the Thanksgiving break for K-12 audiences. However, Gladiator 2 stayed put on their 22nd release date and, as a result, was able to share in the success of Wicked.
The receival of the films by the public was very similar to another excellent box office battle from 2023, that of Barbie and Oppenheimer. Both 2023 films found immense success being released on the same day in July last year. Even though catering to two entirely different crowds of moviegoers, many patrons bought tickets to both films to participate in the "Barbenheimer" double feature. Not only did the movies bring in some of the largest post-COVID crowds, but audiences made viewing the films into an event, with moviegoers wearing pink to see Barbie.
Now, whether Paramount and Universal were purposely trying to recreate the lightning in a bottle that was Barbie and Oppenheimer or engaging in friendly competition, they successfully encouraged audiences to make going to the movies an event once again.
Just as Barbie had a strong pink color identity in its marketing campaign, Wicked's marketing team ensured that they thought of the film whenever audiences saw pink and green. So, just as they did with Barbie, audiences came dressed on theme in pink and green, with some patrons even taking it to the next level by painting themselves green to look like Elphaba.
Getting audiences to dress up for film releases used to be a practice reserved for large established IPs like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, but now, more recently, it has been more widely adopted by moviegoers for all types of movies. There has been a positive correlation with audience engagement and films if the release warrants an opportunity for moviegoers to dress up. This behavior has been seen with Wicked and Barbie, but also with the release of Minions: The Rise of Gru in 2022, where audiences came dressed as minions with their iconic yellow and blue overall character design.
Perhaps this weekend's box office success can be attributed to already-established IP, word of mouth, or simply a diverse group of films that has something for everyone, but overall, it's great to see people once again excited to be going to the movies. In the years following the pandemic, theaters have greatly struggled. Still, they have always found great success when audiences unite over a film, and seeing a film becomes a social event they can dress up for or feel like they are actively participating in. This reaction may be an after-effect of the pandemic and people's craving for social interaction.
Regardless, the most recent film releases that have garnered this sort of social participation have found the most success and drawn the most audiences to the theater. It will be interesting if Hollywood tries to continue the trend of polar opposite double feature match-ups at the box office in the future.
We hope future films can spark the same social buzz as Wicked and Barbie, and cultivate a positive outlook around going to the theater to experience a film, reviving moviegoing as a community experience.