Disney’s ‘Encanto’ is flying high at the box office

The Thanksgiving box office can often be a hit-and-miss affair, but a new blockbuster animation from Disney and a Ridley Scott feature that isn’t designed to draw in those pesky millennials are proving strong enough to generate solid business, on top of a solid second weekend hold for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

Encanto is on course to finish the five-day holiday frame with close to $44 million in the bank, and while that’s roughly the same as Afterlife pulled in across three last week, let’s not forget that families tend to have a lot on their hands across the Thanksgiving period.

Audiences have also torn themselves away from their phones long enough to propel Gladiator director Scott’s second new movie in little over a month to an estimated five-day haul of nearly $22 million, with House of Gucci‘s extravagant trappings clearly proving to be more palatable than the grim and gritty historical epic The Last Duel.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife should still have enough left in the proton pack to finish up in second, though, with fans of the franchise enjoying the hybrid of sequel and reboot much more than critics, so things are looking good that the third canonical entry in the series will serve as the launchpad for additional supernatural adventures.