I was rooting for Hexed to break Disney's Thanksgiving curse. The tracking says it won't

When I covered Hexed in October, I laid out the pattern: Disney's Thanksgiving slot has produced two billion-dollar sequels and two original-movie write-downs in four years, and Hexed — the studio's first original since Wish — was the next experiment. I wanted the original to win one. The tracking arrived this week, and it's not winning one.

Deadline's projection for the November 25 opening is $40–50 million over the five-day Thanksgiving frame, in a dead heat with Universal's Focker-in-Law. In late October, tracking pointed to the biggest original animated debut since Moana, with some reads reaching for $70 million. The forecast lost twenty million dollars in three weeks.

The Good Dinosaur line

To feel the weight of $40–50 million over five days, you need one comparison. The Good Dinosaur — the 2015 Thanksgiving release that stands as Pixar's defining box-office failure — opened to $55.5 million in the same five-day frame, a decade of ticket-price inflation ago.

The Good Dinosaur taught Pixar what a flop feels like. Hexed's optimistic scenario lands five million short of it.

On r/boxoffice, the regulars did the same math and reached for the same shelf:

"A $50m 5-day would be lower than Good Dinosaur ($55m). $40m 5-day, their low end prediction, is approaching 'quite bad' territory. We need to get a look at the budget for Hexed to determine what it needs to hit; odds are it is large because they scrapped the movie to do it over again."

The redo part is documented. As I wrote in October, Hexed was announced at D23 in August 2025 as the story of an awkward teenage boy; by CinemaCon the following April, the protagonist was a girl named Billie, with Disney never explaining the switch. Thread estimates put the resulting budget at $175–200 million — unconfirmed, but a late retool of a CG feature is exactly how budgets get there.

0 for 3, and then what

At this point the slot history stops being trivia and becomes a verdict. Strange World, Thanksgiving 2022: a write-down of about $197 million. Wish, Thanksgiving 2023: $254.9 million worldwide against a budget around $200 million. Hexed, Thanksgiving 2026: tracking below both of their ambitions, in a slot where Moana 2 and Zootopia 2 just printed a billion dollars each.

If the tracking holds, Disney's originals go 0 for 3 in the studio's own holiday corridor, with the sequels 2 for 2. No studio run by accountants reads that scoreboard twice. The next original with a November dream will be rerouted to spring or streaming, the slot goes to whatever has a "2" in the title — Frozen 3 is already parked for Thanksgiving 2027 — and the curse stops being a curse and becomes policy.

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I'd love Hexed to make this column look stupid. The word of mouth could still do it — Elio legs or Wildwood legs happen — but a start below The Good Dinosaur means the race begins from inside the hole.

Previously we wrote: Is SpongeBob next? Skydance just pulled Paramount Animation's I Eat Poop