Frozen II continued its record-breaking run at the box office this week, beating the $400 million mark on Thursday and remaining in the top five over the holiday weekend, The Numbers is reporting. That’s enough to put the Disney sequel ahead of the 2013 original, and by this time tomorrow, it will beat the lifetime gross of 1994’s The Lion King to become Disney Feature Animation’s biggest film ever. So far, Elsa and Anna have $421 million in the bank stateside.
It’s also worth noting that, unless something happens to stop its momentum, Frozen II is almost certainly going to surpass the original’s $1.274 billion global tally to become the biggest animated movie of all time. The only question is when it will happen. Right now, it has a current worldwide bounty of $1.217 billion, so it could claim the top spot by as soon as the end of next week.
Of course, the number one movie at the box office for the weekend was still Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, which fell a bit harder than some were expecting, but still made a very healthy $72 million, bringing it to a total gross of $360 million after 10 days in theaters. Yes, yes, this is a lot less than The Force Awakens pulled off back in 2015 over the same period of time, but Skywalker was never going to pull off those kinds of numbers, especially after The Last Jedi took a lot of financial juice out of the franchise (and even that movie was still huge by any other standards, finishing with $620 million stateside). As of right now, The Rise of Skywalker is behaving a lot like 2016’s Rouge One, and should wrap things up with more than $500 million in its pockets without any problem.
Elsewhere at the box office, Disney released Blue Sky’s Spies in Disguise on Christmas Day, delivering decent though not spectacular results. Since Wednesday, the Will Smith comedy has made $22 million, and while that may not sound like a lot, it’s important to mention that Spies was a basically finished movie that Disney basically got for free as part of the 20th Century Fox acquisition earlier this year, and though official production budget information is unavailable, it’s unlikely it was overly expensive. Spies got an “A-” CinemaScore from audiences and fared well with critics at 72% “fresh” over at Rotten Tomatoes.
Meanwhile, Cats continued to be thrown into the box office litter box, as the big budget musical simply hasn’t been able to take off. With a huge budget thanks to its cast and special effects, it’s going to lose a lot of money before all is said and done. So far, Cats has made only $17 million.
Final figures are due tomorrow.