Memorial Day is a relatively sleepy time of year at the box office, but this holiday weekend, one special extraterrestrial got audiences to theaters in droves.
Disney’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch” remake broke records over the holiday, notching the best numbers ever over the four-day weekend with a colossal $341.7 million worldwide.
It’s a relatively quick reversal of fortune for Disney, whose previous live-action remake, “Snow White,” was a critical and commercial flop just two months ago, when the $250 million-budgeted movie made $42 million its opening weekend in March.
The success of “Lilo & Stitch” — and the Memorial Day box office in general, where Tom Cruise brought Paramount’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” to a franchise-best $77 million domestic opening and a worldwide gross of over $200 million — is a heartening sign for the post-COVID movie theater business.
It also offers some clues into what does and doesn’t resonate with audiences when it comes to Disney’s increasingly hit-or-miss live-action remakes.
Disney needs to be more selective in doing live-action remakes
“Snow White” had its troubles from the start — there was online controversy over how it depicted the seven dwarfs, then costars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot publicly took opposing sides on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — but the biggest was that Disney even dared to take on the holy grail of animated movies in the first place. 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” isn’t just a beloved work; it’s the first animated feature film Walt Disney Studios released.
Not only was Disney trying to reboot the ultimate Disney classic, but it was attempting to modernize an out-of-date story for the people who come to a movie like this: children.
That last point was never a problem for “Lilo & Stitch.” The 2002 animated comedy about a trouble-making alien who befriends a young Hawaiian girl has had three direct-to-video sequels and three TV series in the two decades since its release.
The IP — not to mention the merch, which is some of the most popular in the Disney library — has been embedded in the minds of children who have watched some version of the characters since birth. And for their parents, there’s a sense of nostalgia that motivates them to want to see it, too. Checking both those boxes is hard for a title that was released 88 years ago to pull off.
“Snow White” proved what previous lackluster Disney live-action releases like “Dumbo” and “Mary Poppins Returns” already hinted at: that Disney needs to leave the legacy titles alone.
The PG-rated movie is box office king
Sure, R-rated movies might be flashier and sexier, and PG-13 movies offer a moderate amount of edge, but there’s a reason PG movies are making a resurgence at the box office: they’re for everyone.
Since January, the studios have released nine PG-rated movies, and they have been cash cows. For example, along with “Lilo & Stitch,” there was DreamWorks Animation’s “Dog Man,” which grossed $144 million worldwide, and Warner Bros’ “A Minecraft Movie,” which is nearing $1 billion in worldwide gross. This comes after a 2024 where four of the top five box office earners were PG-rated (“Inside Out 2,” “Wicked,” “Moana 2,” “Despicable Me 4”).
Thankfully for the health of the 2025 summer box office, there’s more PG-rated fare ahead, like the live-action release of Universal’s “How to Train Your Dragon” and Pixar’s “Elio,” both of which are out in June.
Asked about what the Memorial Day weekend box office indicates for the rest of the summer’s numbers, Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian was optimistic.
“Buckle up,” he said. “We’re going to have one hell of a summer.”
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