The 2025 Thanksgiving box office offered a mix of hopeful news for movie theaters thanks to a pair of top blockbuster sequels, along with a cautious reminder that the marketplace still isn’t firing on all cylinders.
Driven by a $156 million extended opening from Disney’s “Zootopia 2” and a $93 million second weekend for Universal’s “Wicked: For Good,” the five-day Thanksgiving period is estimated to bring in $297 million in overall grosses for the United States and Canada.
That is just above the $293 million five-day total accumulated before inflation adjustment in 2013, the year of “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” and “Frozen.” Depending on Monday actuals, 2025 will rank as either the third or fourth highest Thanksgiving weekend in industry history, with the record belonging to 2024 at $423.9 million followed by 2019 at $314.8 million.
From Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps’ spectacular return to theaters to the start of a new experiment by Focus Features with the release of Oscar frontrunner “Hamnet” in a flailing specialty market, there are a lot of takeaways from this holiday period. But let’s start with the one sobering reminder that the box office’s October slump isn’t completely behind us.
A top-heavy total
Combined, “Zootopia 2” and “Wicked: For Good” made $249 million over the extended Thanksgiving weekend. That accounts for nearly 84% of the entire overall gross seen this weekend. So a big weekend, yes, but almost entirely due to just two movies.
Compare that to 2013, when the combined $203 million from “Catching Fire” and “Frozen” made up 69% of the overall total. Last year, “Moana 2” and “Wicked” combined for $343 million or 81% of the weekend’s $423.9 million overall total, but Paramount’s “Gladiator II” still earned $44 million over the holiday while Amazon’s “Red One” added $18 million.
This weekend, the No. 3 movie on the charts was Lionsgate’s “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” with just $10 million over five days. For Lionsgate, that’s a totally fine result as the movie will cross $60 million in domestic grosses next weekend and make “Now You See Me 3” their highest-grossing film of the past two years.
But for theaters, it is a sign of how top-heavy this holiday period is, and that is a lingering side effect of not having any October or early November releases with considerable legs. In a way, it is a microcosm of what the theatrical market has been in 2025: capable of huge tentpole hits, but lacking in month-to-month consistency.
‘Zootopia’ is Disney’s underrated ace franchise
It may have been easy to forget amidst the wild success of “Moana” as a pandemic streaming hit and the billion-dollar run of its sequel last year, but back in 2016, the sea-faring musical made over $350 million less than “Zootopia,” which to this day stands alongside “Frozen” as one of only two non-sequel, non-spinoff animated films to gross $1 billion worldwide.
But “Zootopia 2” should remind the world that Nick and Judy are just as much of a dynamic duo in Disney’s constellation of characters as Moana and Maui or Anna and Elsa. While Thanksgiving release patterns make comps to the first “Zootopia” inexact, the Friday-to-Sunday domestic total for “Zootopia 2” stands at $96.8 million, 28% higher than its predecessor’s opening in the spring nine years ago.
Along with familiarity and sterling critical and audience reception, “Zootopia 2” also had the advantage of going up against “Wicked: For Good” as its competition, a much-anticipated “closing chapter” sequel that most fans flocked to on opening weekend. “For Good” has a $270 million 10-day domestic total that is just slightly above the $263 million total of the first “Wicked.”
While “Wicked: For Good” continues to successfully turn out moviegoers in its own lane, “Zootopia 2” likely benefited from getting general audiences who already saw “For Good” last weekend and were now hearing that Disney had put out one of its best-reviewed films of the past decade.
Aside from parents with teens dying to see “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” next weekend, “Zootopia 2” will have families all to themselves until “Avatar: Fire and Ash” and “The SpongeBob Movie: The Search for SquarePants” come out on Dec. 19. Depending on continued turnout, there’s a good chance “Zootopia 2” can match the $460 million domestic run of “Moana 2.”
It’s also massively popular in China
“Zootopia” fandom is huge in Asia, and the performance of the sequel in China alone proves just how popular this franchise is in the East.
You might have to be a hardcore theme park enthusiast or Disney Adult to be aware of this in the United States, but the “Zootopia” section of Shanghai Disneyland has been far and away its most popular area since it opened in 2023. But not even those who were aware of that popularity could have predicted the meteoric launch that “Zootopia 2” had in Asia, one that could make it Hollywood’s biggest Chinese hit when all is said and done.
On Saturday alone, “Zootopia 2” grossed $104 million from Chinese theaters, second only to “Detective Chinatown 3” for the all-time highest single day gross in the country. Its $271 million five-day launch is second only to “Avengers: Endgame” among Hollywood films in China and is sixth among all films ever, and Chinese film site Maoyan is predicting a total run of at least $500 million with a chance to pass the $632 million total of “Endgame” for the all-time MPA record.
Eight years ago, Disney was pleasantly surprised when Pixar’s “Coco” became a breakout hit in China thanks to a bit of cross-cultural pollination. Although the film focused on Mexico’s Dia De Muertos traditions, it deeply resonated with Chinese moviegoers who have their own traditions for honoring their dead with the Qingming Festival.
But here with “Zootopia” — whose Chinese title translates to “Crazy Animal City” — the appeal of the film is the same as anywhere else. It’s a bright, colorful and playful movie filled with talking animals and visual sight gags, led by a pair of charismatic protagonists whose partnership — and potential romance — have gotten hundreds of millions around the world emotionally invested. Not even the China-set “Kung Fu Panda” series has been this successful.
If there’s anyone wondering whether “Zootopia” provides some hints for Hollywood as to how to get China interested in their films again, you probably won’t find anything helpful. While “Avatar” is also resonant in China, other franchises once popular in China during the 2010s like Marvel and “Fast & Furious” have fallen by the wayside. “Zootopia” is a rare gem. But that rare gem status will be reason enough for Disney to greenlight a third film ASAP.
Women turned out yet again
As theaters count up their receipts from this weekend, it is worth remembering something about the opening weekend stats for the two blockbusters doing all the heavy lifting: After an opening weekend for “Wicked: For Good” that saw a female audience share of 71% and a “Now You See Me 3” opening weekend that was 54% female, “Zootopia 2” came in this weekend with a domestic female audience share of 60%.
Meanwhile, Paramount’s “Regretting You,” the latest Colleen Hoover adaptation, has grossed $89 million at the global box office against a $30 million budget, while the studio’s $110 million-budget “The Running Man,” meant to be the R-rated, action-packed, male-focused alternative to “Zootopia” and “Wicked,” has bombed with just $60.5 million worldwide and counting.
Like “Barbie” two years ago, it has been women driving this box office surge, serving as yet another reminder of the power of providing a wide array of films catering to different audience subgroups.
The “Hamnet” experiment begins
Finally, it is worth noting the release of Focus Features’ “Hamnet,” which may have been lost among all the fur flying at the box office but will be an important movie to keep an eye on over the next two months. Chloé Zhao’s critically acclaimed drama and TIFF Audience Award winner earned a modest $1.35 million from 119 theaters for a per-theater average of $11,345.
But that screen count of 119 is a deliberate one on Focus’ part, as the studio takes a different approach to building buzz for a film that has filled auditoriums with audible sobs.
According to insiders at Focus, “Hamnet” will not get a home platform release on PVOD or streaming until February at the earliest, as the distributor wants to keep the film theatrically exclusive for when it expands to its widest screen count the weekend after Oscar nominations are revealed on Jan. 22. “Hamnet” is widely expected to earn a Best Picture nomination as well as nods for Zhao and her two stars, Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal.
As for its release in 28 local markets, Focus insiders say they wanted to give “Hamnet” a wider initial release on Thanksgiving weekend than just New York and Los Angeles or the top 10 cities in the country, but not a nationwide one in the face of “Zootopia” and “Wicked.” To figure out its plan, Focus turned to audience data for a variety of specialty releases over the past three years, particularly Focus’s own recent Oscar winners “The Holdovers” and “Conclave.”
After sifting through the data, the studio picked out select cities such as Portland where a large number of moviegoers showed up for those films, and gave “Hamnet” a release in two or three theaters in each city, save for the big markets like New York and LA, which got a handful more theaters. The hope is to slowly roll the film out over the next two months, building audience buzz before having its biggest expansion right when Oscar nominations come.
It’s not the same as the NY/LA platform strategy that used to be the tried-and-true pattern for prestige films before COVID, but neither is it the full nationwide blast that recent struggling Oscar hopefuls like “The Smashing Machine” tried to poor results. If “Hamnet” can find sustainable box office numbers over the next two months, perhaps this is a strategy that other studios with critically beloved but emotionally mature offerings can try in this uncertain specialty market.
