America’s most-streamed movies are wholesome animated musicals... and it’s not even close
As parents of little Elsas and Olafs everywhere will know, there’s nothing like a catchy tune in an animated film to capture kids’ imaginations — and keep the movie on constant rotation, sung along to again and again.
When “Moana,” a family-friendly flick set in ancient Polynesia, was released in 2016, it was a box office meh. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, it didn’t pass the billion-dollar mark in theaters, it didn’t win any Oscars, and it was only the seventh biggest Disney film that year, with “Finding Dory” accruing more than double its total gross. Now, the tides of streaming have made “Moana” the biggest movie in America, being viewed for almost 45 billion minutes since 2020, by Nielsen estimates.
The film’s rise up the ranks has been steady, and somewhat unprecedented: it was one of the most-watched movies in the US in 2020, 2021, and 2022, before becoming the top movie on streaming last year and this year. More broadly, “Moana” is indicative of a wider trend: wholesome sing-alongs are, by some distance, the biggest movies on streaming services in the last four years, with all of the top 10 classed as family animated movies, and six of those being musicals.
So, after the recent success of Oz-based blockbuster “Wicked,” households should heed caution: once kids hold space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” they may never let it go.
When “Moana,” a family-friendly flick set in ancient Polynesia, was released in 2016, it was a box office meh. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, it didn’t pass the billion-dollar mark in theaters, it didn’t win any Oscars, and it was only the seventh biggest Disney film that year, with “Finding Dory” accruing more than double its total gross. Now, the tides of streaming have made “Moana” the biggest movie in America, being viewed for almost 45 billion minutes since 2020, by Nielsen estimates.
The film’s rise up the ranks has been steady, and somewhat unprecedented: it was one of the most-watched movies in the US in 2020, 2021, and 2022, before becoming the top movie on streaming last year and this year. More broadly, “Moana” is indicative of a wider trend: wholesome sing-alongs are, by some distance, the biggest movies on streaming services in the last four years, with all of the top 10 classed as family animated movies, and six of those being musicals.
So, after the recent success of Oz-based blockbuster “Wicked,” households should heed caution: once kids hold space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” they may never let it go.
