One key decision helped 'Moana 2' win at the box office and become Disney's 'hottest IP'

• Disney's "Moana 2" broke Thanksgiving box office records, bringing in $380 million globally.
• In previous years, Disney struggled at the Thanksgiving weekend box office with "Wish" and "Strange World."
• Originally created as a series, "Moana 2" was shifted to a film, boosting Disney's theatrical strategy.

First, Disney proved it was still king of the summer movie season with the enormous success of "Deadpool & Wolverine." Now, the studio has also reclaimed its hold on the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with "Moana 2."

The sequel to the beloved 2016 animated movie brought in over $380 million worldwide in its first five days in theaters, which included over $220 million domestically. The latter is a new five-day Thanksgiving box office record, surpassing the $125 million "Frozen 2" earned in 2019.

The success of "Moana 2" was much needed for Disney, and for its animation division in particular, as the past few Thanksgivings have not been so bountiful.

For roughly the last decade, the Disney titles released over Thanksgiving were usually guaranteed box office coin, with animated fare like "Coco" (2017) and both "Frozen" movies (2013, 2019) notching major wins for the studio. But 2022 and 2023, the post-COVID years when audiences began returning to theaters, were a bust: "Strange World" and "Wish" took in $19 million and $32 million respectively on their five-day Thanksgiving opening weekends in 2022 and 2023.

In 2024, Disney is faring better. The over $1 billion take "Inside Out 2" made in June proved that audiences were out of the COVID-era haze of waiting to see Disney animated titles at home, especially Pixar movies. The success of "Moana 2" confirms that families want to see their animation on the big screen.

And it was Disney's fast thinking at the eleventh hour that kept the momentum going.

"Even the Disney brass were apparently unaware how beloved this property was as it was very close to going straight to streaming," Exhibitor Relations senior analyst Jeff Bock told Business Insider.

That's right. The "Moana" sequel was originally developed as a series for Disney+.

"Moana: The Series" was announced at the Disney Investor Day in 2020, with the plan being to delve deeper into the characters and mythology in the "Moana" franchise. But in February 2024, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced the change from series to sequel, stating on an earnings call that Disney executives were "impressed" by early footage and felt it "deserved a theatrical release."

Looking back on the sequel's journey to the screen, codirector David Derrick Jr. said that starting with the larger scope a TV series provides ultimately strengthened the story when it was adapted into a feature.

"What the series gave us was an opportunity to get to know these characters intimately, the way you can with a series, but what we were doing in the story just begged for a bigger and bigger screen," he told Collider.

"So, as soon as we funneled all of the learnings from our new characters through Moana's journey, it actually just strengthened Moana's growth and the theme of the story. So, there wasn't, for me, anything left out from the series. We were able to learn things from the series that just supercharged the feature."

Pivoting from series to feature was also a savvy business decision. After the COVID box-office slump, many studios realized that movies released exclusively in theaters didn't just bring more profitability in the initial release, but also fueled secondary windows like streaming.

Perhaps Disney brass realized in the four years from announcing the series to changing it to a feature-length film that despite the slumping box office, rededicating itself to a "Moana" theatrical release would generate more profit than it would if it were a streaming release alone.

Even after "Moana 2" eventually hits streaming, there will be more "Moana" coming. The live-action version of the movie, which stars Dwayne Johnson in the flesh as Maui, is coming in summer 2026.

But should Disney be scared of "Moana" burnout?

"I doubt it," Bock said. "'Moana' is officially the hottest IP in Disney's vast kingdom. 2026 is the perfect spacing."