Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament has returned, and as you’ll see from the most profitable films of 2024 that we’re disclosing, a movie’s game doesn’t end at the box office. Rather, its downstream revenues and subsequent home windows must be taken into account. Streaming continues to be a wildcard: While traditional motion picture studios such as Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and Universal rely on lucrative pay two and pay three streamer deals to catapult their slates into the black, those streamers who’ve embraced theatrical (specifically Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films) have a clandestine metric as to how they evaluate a movie’s post-cinema success. By traditional studio P&L standards, some of those releases would be considered flops. Given that, Apple and Amazon are excluded from this year’s survey. The Most Valuable Blockbuster series runs later rather than sooner as we gather the best data possible from seasoned and trusted sources on 2024’s event films, bombs, and low- to midsize-budget wins.
The Film
MOANA 2
Disney
There was suspense at the start of 2024: Disney still hadn’t announced what its big Thanksgiving tentpole would be. The Mouse House always owned the space but in the post-Covid era hadn’t seen the type of hits like the Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph franchises. Then in February, before a Q1 earnings call, CEO Bob Iger announced that the studio was turning a Disney+ Moana series into fire-breathing theatrical sequel. The idea for that was conceived by Disney Entertainment co-chairman Alan Bergman, who recognized the popularity of the first 2016 double Oscar-nominated animated movie as a hit on the service; Moana clocked some 1.4 billion hours, the most for any movie on Disney+.
With Moana 2, Disney shook off all the dust from the Bob Chapek regime when it came to sending prized properties straight to the streaming service instead of theatrical; Hocus Pocus 2 and Enchanted 2 left money on the table as being Disney+-only destinations. With the announcement, Disney pushed its live-action feature take of Moana to July 2026, and got Dwayne Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho back to reprise their roles as demigod Maui and Moana, respectively. The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear took over tunes on Part 2 from Oscar-nominated songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, who penned the ditties on the first film. The epic animation this time around was clearly prime for the big screen, not smaller screens at home. While Disney went head-to-head with Wicked over the Thanksgiving frame, days after that musical opened, the holiday marketplace was plenty large enough to pull in families and women of all ages. Overall, a self-fulfilling prophecy of success here. As Iger says, the feature comeback is all about the trusted Disney brands.
The Box Score
The Bottom Line
Moana 2 posted the biggest five-day Thanksgiving haul ever with $225.4 million, unseating Frozen 2‘s previous five-day record of $125M. Disney’s commitment to theatrical windows with 62 days until Premium VOD — and 105 days until Disney+, where the movie posted a 27.3M viewers in its five-day premiere, third-best ever for the service — assisted in sending the movie to $460.4M at the domestic box office and $1.05 billion globally, besting the first Moana ($248.7M U.S.-Canada, $643M worldwide). The $210M global revenues includes the amount that Disney pays itself in the first pay-one window to make good on participants, mostly Johnson, with $35M. Interest and overhead combined are $30M, each of them figured at 10% of production cost; studios have an internal capital structure when it comes to financing and need to factor in the interest carried during the movie’s production and an allocated overhead representing studio staffing and other costs. Not accounted for here is the massive amount of merchandise revenue generated by the sequel; it was the biggest merchandise driver of 2024 for Disney. Net profit here is $415M after all ancillaries, which is pretty great. By comparison, Frozen 2, which had a higher global take at $1.45B worldwide, yielded close to $600M in net profit.
