Box office: Disney's Wish falls to Napoleon over the Thanksgiving weekend

Both films cost up to $200 million and grossed a little more than $30 million in their first five days, but the discourse around them has been very, very different.

Asha wishes for a better opening weekend, in Disney’s Wish.

There was more bad news at the box office for Disney this week.

Wish, an animated film that was explicitly promoted as a celebration of 100 years of Disney filmmaking—and which many people believed would win the American Thanksgiving weekend, like many other Disney films have done in the past—fell far behind projections and landed in third place, behind last week’s dystopian Hunger Games prequel and Ridley Scott’s new R-rated historical epic Napoleon.

The Disney film’s collapse resulted in this being the first time in over a decade that neither of the top two films at Thanksgiving was an animated film. It also marks possibly the first time ever that Disney released a new family film at Thanksgiving and it was beaten by another studio’s new movie, in this case Napoleon.

Last week’s winner, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, held on to the top spot with an estimated $28.8 million for the weekend, raising its domestic total to $98.4 million after two weeks, while Napoleon outdid expectations by grossing $20.4 million for the weekend and $32.5 million since opening on Tuesday night.

By comparison, Wish—which was originally expected to do more than twice as much business as Napoleon—fell behind the R-rated epic with $19.5 million for the weekend and $31.7 million since opening on Tuesday (though a small portion of that actually came from “early access” screenings that took place the week before).

The demise of Wish capped a year of bad news for Disney, which has seen nearly every one of its major films flop this year, from The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania to Haunted Mansion and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Wish did, at least, do better than Strange World, which opened to a mere $18.9 million over Thanksgiving last year; but it did worse than nearly every other Disney Thanksgiving release since the turn of the century—including Encanto, which opened to $40.6 million in 2021, at a time when the pandemic was still going strong and everyone knew the film would be on Disney+ just one month later.

Wish also had a worse first weekend than Elemental, which scored the lowest debut in Pixar history when it opened to $29.6 million last June.

The question now is whether Wish can have the kind of staying power that Elemental had. That film ended its run with $154.4 million—more than five times what it opened to—partly due to a lack of competition over the summer. But Wish is already up against DreamWorks’ Trolls Band Together—this week’s #4 film—and it will be facing the live-action Wonka and the animated Migration in the weeks to come.

One striking thing about this week’s two new films is that they both cost up to $200 million to make, and they both grossed just a bit more than $30 million in their debuts, but the buzz around their debuts has been very, very different.

• Wish, produced by a legacy movie studio, is widely regarded as a disaster that was undermined by the audience’s assumption that the film will be available on the studio’s streaming service before too long.

  • It was expected to open to $50 million or more; it made a lot less.

• Napoleon, on the other hand, was made by a super-rich tech company (i.e. Apple) for its own streaming service, and the current theatrical release is apparently regarded by both the company and the audience as a bonus of sorts.

  • It was expected to open to $22 million or so; it made quite a bit more.

It will be interesting to see how the two films do over the next few weeks.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: