Moviegoers Feasted on Nicolas Cage, Superheroes, and SpongeBob at the Thanksgiving Box Office 20 Years Ago

When it comes to the Thanksgiving 2024 box office, all anyone can talk about is the impending collision of Wicked, Gladiator II, and Moana 2. If box office tracking pans out, all three titles are set to have massive opening weekends that take the Thanksgiving box office to new heights. Given all the hype surrounding these three modern movies, it’s easy to give in to recency bias and assume this is the most crowded Thanksgiving timeframe ever for new movies. However, many previous Thanksgiving box office frames have been incredibly packed affairs, including the Thanksgiving theatrical landscape of 20 years ago.

Back over November 26-28, 2004, a slew of fresh releases dominated the box office to create an especially lucrative Thanksgiving box office frame. The sixth-biggest weekend of 2004 domestically with a $146.4 million haul, that Thanksgiving weekend is fascinating to look back on with two decades of separation. It mostly looks like a relic from another planet, albeit with one or two hints of what the future of moviegoing would look like. If nothing else, it reflects how Thanksgiving is always a prime opportunity to launch big new movies.

National Treasure Was the Biggest Movie of Thanksgiving 2004

Topping this three-day box office frame was National Treasure in its second weekend of release. This feature grossed another $32.1 million, a tiny 8% decrease from its debut weekend. Nicolas Cage hunting for treasure tied into American history had turned into a home run at the box office for Disney, as seen by the feature’s $87.2 million 10-day domestic haul. Between National Treasure and the previous year’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films were creating box office gold by directly collaborating rather than shunting Bruckheimer’s films to Disney’s adult-skewing division like Touchstone Pictures.

Speaking of the Mouse House, fellow Disney holdover The Incredibles grossed another $23.58 million this frame, an 11% dip from the previous weekend. Already in its fourth weekend of release, this Pixar title had grossed $214.29 million million domestically by this point. In third place was the biggest non-Disney title of the weekend, Christmas with the Kranks. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Santa Clause 2, and Elf at the dawn of the 2000s inspired a renaissance for new Christmas movies at the domestic box office. Kranks, with its $21.57 million three-day opening weekend, reflected the early 2000s popularity of these titles.

That weekend’s fourth biggest movie, The Polar Express, also reflected this reality thanks to its mighty $19.38 million third-weekend gross this frame. With Christmas fast approaching, The Polar Express experienced a 23% increase from the previous weekend. Rounding out the top five was yet another PG-rated movie, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which grossed another $17.84 million in its second weekend of release. Family movies are often popular titles over big holiday weekends, as seen by the plethora of Walt Disney Animation Studios movies that opened over Thanksgiving weekend.

However, Thanksgiving 2004 took this tendency to an extreme degree. The top five movies in North America were rated PG or G and were aimed at families. The fact that all five titles grossed at least $17.8+ million each reflects how movies aimed at similar audiences can simultaneously co-exist and even thrive. Adult-skewing movies didn’t quite fare as well over Thanksgiving 20 years ago, unfortunately. Oliver Stone’s costly Alexander opened to only $13.68 million over its three-day weekend bow.

Thanksgiving 2004 Was Drastically Different From Modern Moviegoing

Thanksgiving 2004 isn’t just remarkable because it was dominated by family movies. It’s also worth noting that the top four movies were non-sequels (albeit two were based on pre-existing source material). Those top two movies, National Treasure and The Incredibles, were entirely original features! Cut to Thanksgiving 2024, which is set to be dominated by an animated sequel, a legacy Gladiator sequel, and an adaptation of a Broadway show spiritually succeeding a famous 1937 Wizard of Oz adaptation. The days of Hollywood entrusting original ideas to this pronounced degree is over. Heck, even translating new hit kid’s TV shows like SpongeBob SquarePants to the big screen is no longer the norm. Nostalgia-driven adaptations rooted in 1980s/1990s small-screen programming are more common.

Meanwhile, the Thanksgiving 2004 box office also differs from modern box office frames in terms of the wealth spreading across multiple movies. Today, it’s common for the top two biggest movies in America to have sizeable $30+ million grosses and the rest of the top ten to score individual hauls well below $4 million. Back over Thanksgiving 2004, though, three separate movies cracked $20+ million each. Six titles scored $10+ million hauls a piece. Compare that to Thanksgiving 2022, when only two movies each cracked $10+ million domestically. Domestic box office leader Black Panther: Wakanda Forever drove almost all ticket sales that frame.

The only way Thanksgiving 2004 really heralded future box office trends was in having two Disney movies top the domestic box office. For many years in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Walt Disney Pictures was not the box-office juggernaut it is today. In years like 2000, its annual domestic box office haul barely cracked $1 billion, while 2001’s domestic gross came to just $901.6 million. That’s a far cry from its 2018 haul of $3.13 billion! 2003 hits like Finding Nemo and Black Pearl already suggested Disney could be on the upswing and 2004 kept the good times rolling.

The Incredibles and National Treasure simultaneously thriving in November was a huge coup for the Mouse House and mirrored future Novembers when it would release two lucrative blockbusters. Thor: Ragnarok and Coco both flourished in November 2017, for instance, while Doctor Strange and Moana dominated November 2016. Save for indicating Disney’s then-forthcoming box office renaissance, though, Thanksgiving 2004 is very much removed from modern box office norms. It’s only been 20 years yet a landscape relying on original films and not just one box office hit to carry the load feels so alien to 2024 norms. Studio executives and movie theater owners alike, however, are undoubtedly hoping Thanksgiving 2024 heavyweights like Wicked and Moana 2 take a cue from the multitude of Thanksgiving 2004 hits that excelled financially without capsizing one another.