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Something was up when several attendees at my Thanksgiving dinner talked about sold-out crowds at their usually-empty local theater. People were flocking to the movies. Wicked’s strong word of mouth a variety of offerings for every kind of moviegoer, from men with Gladiator II to families with Moana, and those looking for some kind of holiday uplift with Wicked. This is what the box office used to be like, what Hollywood used to be. It’s a nice thing to see.

The box office for these films, covered by Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro:

Moana 2 is expected to do at least $55M, which would make it a Black Friday record for the No. 1-grossing film, above Frozen II‘s $34.1M back in 2019. Wicked is on course to do $27M Friday, while Paramount’s Gladiator II is eyeing at $12.6M. Moana 2 already is blowing away the Frozen II $125M 5-day record over Thanksgiving and could do $200M+. Wicked is looking at the fourth best take over the holiday frame with $105.6M while Gladiator II is looking at $45M.

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Correction: my predictions post from yesterday had two mistakes. 1) it’s Jonathan Bailey, not Jason Bailey. 2) I forgot Wicked on my top ten. I have fixed it now. My top ten for Best Picture look like this:

Anora
The Brutalist
Conclave
Wicked
Dune Part Two
The Substance
Emilia Perez
A Complete Unknown
A Real Pain
September 5
Alts: Sing Sing , Blitz, Inside Out 2, Gladiator II, Nickel Boys

It doesn’t seem right to me to leave out Sing Sing, but I can’t think of which movie to drop. Blitz is also a potentially strong contender with the right kind of buzz. A Best Picture nominee just needs around 100 to 300 number-one votes to get in.

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Also from Deadline, Austin Butler will team up with Conclave director Edward Berger on upcoming time travel movie.

“Based on a short story by [MacMillan] Hedges, the film’s plot is being kept under wraps. But sources have described the project as Interstellar meets Top Gun. Berger will direct from a script by Hedges and produce alongside the author, with Butler to star and exec produce.”

Multiple studios were chasing the project but Fox/Disney won.

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Meanwhile, at Variety, Owen Gleiberman asks:

He writes:

Hollywood sequel culture, in other words, is in reasonably healthy creative shape. And given how much it’s now dominating commercially, in an industry that’s existentially threatened enough to need every theatrical hit it can get, no one in their right mind would dispute the need to make these films. Sequels are luring people into theaters in a way that the most acclaimed movies of the year, from “Anora” to “Conclave,” are not. Where would the current movie landscape be without them?

And yet…there’s something a little skewed about this picture. I can’t recall a moment when sequels crushed the box office this definitively. (Fifteen out of the year’s top 20 grossing movies are sequels.) The sequelization of Hollywood in the ’80s represented a trend all too neurotic in its reality: that the industry, in becoming addicted to “surefire” hits, had grown more comfortable looking backward than forward. Maybe that was always true, to a degree. In the studio-system era, Westerns weren’t sequels, but hundreds — thousands — of them were built out of the same rawhide parts. Superhero movies, in many ways, are the contemporary equivalent.

Hollywood has always cannibalized itself. But the thing is, it hasn’t just cannibalized itself. The contradiction of sequel culture, and the threat of it, is that if all you rely on is concepts from the past, you’re not going to produce enough of a future. To put it in the industry’s corrupt terms: There won’t be enough hit movies to make sequels to. Sequel culture contains, by definition, an element of non-sustainability. And when it comes to the trend of making sequels to 40-year-old movies, how many times can we really go back and strip mine the primal nostalgia of films like “Top Gun” and “Beetlejuice”? (Tom Cruise is said to be trying to line up a sequel to “Days of Thunder.” What’s next, Ridley Scott’s “Legend II”?)

In other words, if Hollywood keeps making sequels, it will then have to make sequels of its sequels. I noticed this same thing happened to Broadway in New York. Now, it’s nearly impossible to find anything original. But original plays are the most memorable — like Hamilton, for instance.

Sequels are like fast food. Easy to meet expectations, with fewer things to choose from. It’s horrific to watch and makes me sad. I wish there was more risk-taking in Hollywood but more than that, I wish there were BETTER MOVIES made by Hollywood. Sequels allow Hollywood to do what it wants to do — be inclusive and “woke” while guaranteeing an audience will maybe show up.

Also, plenty of original films flopped this year, like Horizon, Megalopolis, The Fall Guy (well maybe that wasn’t original). And sequels bombed too, like Furiosa.

I remember visiting Portland once and being startled that, with so many original coffee houses, Starbucks was the most crowded. Why? Maybe people don’t want to spend money on something that might disappoint them in the end. But he’s right, of course. All sequels all the time will take Hollywood to a worse place than it already is now.