Let the feast begin: Thanksgiving releases and awards season contenders, Disney‘s Wish and Apple Original Films and Sony‘s Napoleon are set to open over the Wednesday to Sunday holiday stretch with respective grosses of $50M+ and $24M+. Both movies open on Thanksgiving eve, Nov. 22.
Wish, if it hits its projection, would rep the biggest original animated opening in the past six years since 2017’s Coco which did $72.9M over five days; also a Thanksgiving Disney release. Families and females are showing the best support at the moment. The song “This is the Thanks I Get” performed by Chris Pine dropped recently last week and has been spurring interest for the movie that stars Oscar winner Ariana DeBose.
Other notable Disney original animated pics that launched over the Turkey holiday include 2016’s Moana ($82M), 2010’s Tangled ($68.7M) and Encanto during the 2021 pandemic ($40.5M).
Directed by Chris Buck and Fawn Veerasunthorn, Wish follows a young girl named Asha who wishes on a star and gets a more direct answer than she bargained for when a trouble-making star comes down from the sky to join her.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is of course tracking with older and younger guys, and its 5-day opening is in the range of the helmer’s previous Thanksgiving 2021 launch, House of Gucci, which did $22M over 5-days as well as Prime Video’s Ben Affleck directed title Air which minted $20.2M in a 5-day launch this past Easter.
Napoleon reps Apple’s second mega wide theatrical release on a long window after Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon which Paramount distributed. That pic opened to a solid $23.2M in the middle of an actors strike where performers aren’t permitted to promote struck work. Napoleon begins media previews next Wednesday. The movie starring Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix in the title role has a 2 hour 38 minute running time which is significantly shorter than Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon at 3 1/2 hours. Deadline first told you about Apple financing the $130M epic back in January 2021.
“Napoleon is a man I’ve always been fascinated by,” Scott told Deadline. “He came out of nowhere to rule everything — but all the while he was waging a romantic war with his adulterous wife Josephine. He conquered the world to try to win her love, and when he couldn’t, he conquered it to destroy her, and destroyed himself in the process.”
Opening the weekend before Thanksgiving is Lionsgate’s highly anticipated The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes which is forecasted at a $50M+ 3-day.