‘Wicked’ just broke a surprising box office record

The movie also had one of the best opening weekends of any movie all year.

By Joe Allen Published November 26, 2024

Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in the poster for 'Wicked.' — Warner Bros.

By almost any metric, Wicked is an enormous success at the box office. The adaptation of the hugely popular Broadway musical made more than $100 million over the weekend, and as the first week of its release commences, the movie is continuing to break records.

On Monday, it pulled in $15.8 million, which represents the single best November Monday in box office history, surpassing Frozen II ($12.7 million in 2019) and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ($12.3 million in 2013). Ticket prices have definitely risen in that time, but that definitely doesn’t account for the bump completely.

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The movie has now made $128.1 million over four days and is poised to continue expanding on that box office success over the Thanksgiving holiday.

In addition to its box office success, Wicked has also proven to be successful among critics and has already inspired a viral dance trend on TikTok. Given all of that success, the movie now seems like a lock to receive a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars and could receive many technical nominations as well.

The movie’s success also provides another boon for the box office as many continue to speculate about the future of the big screen experience. While not every movie designed to be a blockbuster hits, enough of them do to remind movie lovers that there are still plenty of people who will go out to the theater if they really want to. Wicked has a built-in fanbase of theater kids that is several generations large at this point, so it probably shouldn’t be all that surprising to see how well it performed.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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