The film, which casts Dwayne Johnson as a Polynesian demigod assisting a young girl on a quest to save her people, raked in $81.1 million across the five-day span encompassing the Thanksgiving holiday and the subsequent weekend. This put the film under the record-setting $93.6 million that Disney’s Frozen earned over the same five-day span in 2013, and ahead of the $80.1 million opening for Toy Story 2 over the Thanksgiving holiday in 1999.
The success of Moana over the Thanksgiving holiday continued a trend set by Disney over the years, with nine of the top ten highest-grossing films over the five-day span — and the three-day span following the holiday — all hailing from the studio. It wasn’t all sunshine and surf for the weekend’s new releases, though.
| # | Title | Weekend | U.S. Total | Worldwide Total |
| 1. | Moana | $81.1M | $81.1M | $97.4M |
| 2. | Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them | $65.7M | $156.2M | $473.7M |
| 3. | Doctor Strange | $18.8M | $205M | $615.9M |
| 4. | Allied | $18M | $18M | $27.4M |
| 5. | Arrival | $15.6M | $62.3M | $93.2M |
| 6. | Trolls | $14.2M | $135.1M | $291M |
| 7. | Almost Christmas | $9.5M | $36.6M | $36.7M |
| 8. | Bad Santa 2 | $9M | $9M | $9M |
| 9. | Hacksaw Ridge | $7.7M | $52.2M | $52.2M |
| 10. | The Edge of Seventeen | $4.2M | $10.2M | $10.2M |
Neither Brad Pitt’s war drama Allied nor Billy Bob Thornton’s raunchy sequel Bad Santa 2 managed to make good on their premieres, with the former failing to cross $20 million domestically and the latter failing to surpass $10 million. Both movies opened well below their respective studios’ hopes, with Allied in particular under-shooting its $85 million budget.
As for the rest of the weekend’s top ten films, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them dropped to second place with a respectable $65.7 million in U.S. theaters and a worldwide gross that now sits at approximately $473.7 million — good for 13th place among the year’s highest-grossing films in only its second week in theaters. The five-day weekend’s third-place film, Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange, added another $18.8 million to its domestic total and moved past the entire domestic grosses of fellow Marvel movies Thor, Ant-Man, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Incredible Hulk.
Also enjoying a positive week-to-week evolution was acclaimed alien-encounter film Arrival, which matched its overwhelmingly positive reviews with a $15.6 million third weekend in theaters — a drop of only 7.3 percent from the prior weekend and a great indication that the well-received film will have a long, productive run.
The upcoming weekend is a relatively light one for new releases, with Natalie Portman’s biopic Jackie — in which she plays former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy — and Shia LaBeouf’s war drama Man Down debuting as the most high-profile new films. Expect to see many of this week’s biggest films continue to top the box-office chart.
