Two Disney originals already flopped on Thanksgiving — Hexed is next, from a director of one of them

Hexed opens on November 25, 2026, in the Thanksgiving corridor Disney has treated as its personal property for over a decade. Hailee Steinfeld voices Billie, an impulsive teenager who unleashes secret magical powers and gets yanked out of suburbia into a witch realm called Hexe; Rashida Jones voices her cautious mom Alice, with Tracey Ullman as an enchanted quill pen and Stephen Fry as a talking journal. It's the 65th feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios, the studio's first original since Wish, and the first original greenlit under chief creative officer Jared Bush, who executive produces.

The slot's recent history splits cleanly along one line, and it isn't quality:

• Strange World (Thanksgiving 2022, original): $73.6 million worldwide, a reported write-down of about $197 million. One of the decade's biggest animated bombs.
• Wish (Thanksgiving 2023, original): $254.9 million worldwide against a roughly $200 million budget. A money-loser dressed as a centennial celebration.
• Moana 2 (Thanksgiving 2024, sequel): a record $221 million five-day opening, $1.06 billion worldwide.
• Zootopia 2 (Thanksgiving 2025, sequel): $556 million global opening, the biggest worldwide debut ever for an animated film.
• Hexed (Thanksgiving 2026): original.

The pattern extends past the holiday. Pixar's Elio bombed in summer 2025 with $152 million worldwide, and the last original animated film to clear $500 million globally remains Coco, from 2017. The slot isn't cursed; originals are.

Disney's Thanksgiving slot has produced two billion-dollar sequels and two original-movie write-downs in four years. Hexed is an original.

The directing duo is the whole story in miniature

Here's the detail the press notes don't dwell on. Hexed is directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand, with Josie Trinidad co-directing. Veerasunthorn co-directed Wish — the second of those two Thanksgiving flops. Hand co-directed Moana 2 — the slot's billion-dollar proof that it still works. The same movie is being steered by a director of the slot's biggest recent failure and a director of its biggest recent win, which makes Hexed about as clean an experiment as box-office analysts will ever get.

Veerasunthorn, for her part, is selling the character rather than the stakes:

"A wonderfully strange phenomenon is happening all around Billie, something she can't explain."

— Fawn Veerasunthorn, in the trailer announcement

One more production footnote worth knowing: when Hexed was announced at Destination D23 in August 2025, Disney described it as the story of an awkward teenage boy and his Type-A mom. By CinemaCon in April 2026, the protagonist had become a girl named Billie. Disney never explained the switch, and retooled leads this close to release are usually a sign the story was still being found.

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What it's up against

The Thanksgiving 2026 frame isn't empty. Universal is putting Fockers-in-Law, the Meet the Parents legacyquel with Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, and Ariana Grande, into the same corridor, going after a lot of the same multigenerational holiday audience. Hexed has the family-animation lane to itself, which is exactly what Strange World and Wish had, too. The variable this time is whether the movie itself travels — and whether being the follow-up act to the biggest animated opening in history counts as momentum or a measuring stick.

Previously we wrote: Scarlett Johansson's Ray Gunn opens at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes after its BFI London premiere — the reviews praise everything except the script