The Biggest Post-Thanksgiving Drops Ever At The Box Office

Thanksgiving weekend is often one of the very best times to launch a movie. After all, everybody needs something to see when the family is in town and/or they have days off from work. The only problem with this timeframe is that pesky post-Thanksgiving weekend frame. Over these three days, movies always experience a steep drop-off from the previous weekend. Even a title as beloved and leggy as Frozen can drop 53% over the post-Thanksgiving weekend frame. It’s just what happens when everyone rushes out to see a movie over Thanksgiving weekend and then gets distracted with other holiday festivities afterwards.

Typically, movies drop in the 50-63% range the weekend after Thanksgiving. Some titles, though, are unfortunately overachievers in this department. Several movies have had historically terrible holds over this particular weekend after having already severely underperforming previous weekend grosses. Ahead, let’s look at the movies that had the biggest weekend-to-weekend plummets ever over the post-Thanksgiving weekend.

Charlie’s Angels Fell Off a Cliff After Thanksgiving

Currently, the biggest wide release post-Thanksgiving drop in history belongs to the maligned 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot, which plummeted 83%. Over the three-day Thanksgiving frame, the film grossed $1.25 million and then proceeded to drum up just $215,247 the following weekend. Partially, that can be explained by Charlie’s Angels losing 2,453 theaters in its fourth weekend. Going from 3,156 locations to just 703 was always going to lead to a decimating decline. Still, the film’s pre-December 2019 numbers were dreadful. There just wasn’t much momentum behind this project, even before the post-Thanksgiving weekend rolled around.

The only other wide release, to date, that fell 80+% in the post-Thanksgiving frame was Free Birds, a 2013 animated family movie most well-known today for inspiring the “we’re going back in time to the first Thanksgiving to get turkeys off the menu” meme. Audiences abandoning Free Birds once December rolled around isn’t surprising in the least since this is a Thanksgiving-themed movie. With Thanksgiving done, there was no reason for audiences to still care about this feature. Plus, Frozen was still sucking up all the family movie audiences in the marketplace after its Thanksgiving 2013 bow. Even the inspiration for a then-future internet meme couldn’t compete with that.

Third-biggest among these drops is The Chosen Season 3: Episode 1 & 2, a special Fathom Events production from 2022 that had already been in the marketplace for two weeks before the post-Thanksgiving frame. Meanwhile, the fourth through eighth slots on this chart (Looney Tunes: Back in Action, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Brother Bear, and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour) are all movies that opened in either early November or late October. These titles dropping so severely after Thanksgiving, more than anything else, reflects these projects simply running their respective courses with audiences.

[Related: Moana 2 Is Still Breaking Box Office Records in Second Weekend]

After being out for months, moviegoers and movie theaters (the latter entity swapping out these holdovers for new releases) were ready for something fresh. That inevitable outcome was just fine for Freddy’s and The Eras Tour, which had already became historic box office hits long before Thanksgiving rolled around. For a flop like Back in Action, crumbling in the post-Thanksgiving weekend was just another reminder of how profitability was elusive for this feature.

What November Blockbusters Collapsed Over This Timeframe?

Many of these big post-Thanksgiving plummets we’ve discussed (save for Freddy’s and The Eras Tour) were already box office bombs long before this steep decline kicked in. The 11th biggest post-Thanksgiving spot, though, concerns a movie meant to shatter box office records: The Matrix Revolutions. Its 71% post-Thanksgiving drop further cemented how this production would not be as massive as its two predecessors. Right behind that Matrix title is The Cat in the Hat, which fell 70% in its third weekend of release. That massive decline reflects just how abrasive word-of-mouth was for one of 2003’s worst-reviewed movies.

To date, only 12 wide releases have dropped 70+% over the post-Thanksgiving weekend frame. However, other hefty drops about for major November blockbusters. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, for instance, plummeted 64% over this timeframe, ditto Quantum of Solace. Even beloved Christmas staple Elf dropped 63% over December 2003’s first weekend. Walt Disney Animation Studios has also seen two titles (The Good Dinosaur and Wish) experience 60+% declines over this frame.

These drops were unfortunate harbingers of the titles simply not sticking around in the marketplace long-term, unlike other Thanksgiving Disney Animation tentpoles like Moana and Tangled, which played through New Year’s. If even the Mouse House knows about these large dips, then you know the post-Thanksgiving box office plummet blues are real. Audience word-of-mouth or your larger pop culture legacy doesn’t matter. Save for the occasional Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, or Dune, all movies succumb to these massive post-Thanksgiving drops. It’s as inevitable as turkey getting carved on Thanksgiving!