Coraline’s Re-Release Defeats Shrek 2 and The Lion King at the Box Office

This weekend’s box office had a lot of attention on Alien: Romulus, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, but another champion was a rerelease of a 2009 hit 3D film, Coraline, that managed to outperform release from movies other high profile re-releases from this year like Shrek 2, The Lion King, and more. Directed by The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ Henry Sellick, Coraline is based on the 2002 novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman. The film follows the title character, a young girl who discovers an idealized alternate universe, unaware of the dark and sinister secret it holds. It was the debut film from Laika Studios and opened in theaters on February 6, 2009, to critical acclaim and brought in $124 million worldwide.

To celebrate the films 15 year anniversary, Coraline was given a special rerelease. According to Deadline, the film brought in $8.3 million dollars, taking the number five spot at the box office. Notably, Coraline‘s re-release performed better than other 2024 anniversary rereleases like the 20th anniversary of Shrek 2 ($1.4 million), the 25th anniversary of The Mummy ($1 million), the 30th anniversary of The Lion King ($1 million), the 45the anniversary Alien ($1.5 million). Coraline‘s opening weekend nearly matched the 25th-anniversary rerelease of The Phantom Menace from earlier this year, which brought in $8.7 million. What is even more impressive is Coraline‘s release started on Thursday, so factoring in its four-day opening total, it would be $11 million. Here is a breakdown of how Coraline opening weekend compared to other high-profile releases of 2024.

Coraline For The Win

What makes Coraline‘s opening rerelease so impressive is how the original film compared to all of those other movies, particularly other animated films like Shrek 2 and The Lion King. To this day, The Lion King remains the highest-grossing hand-drawn animated film, and Shrek 2 held the title for the highest-grossing animated film of all time at the time of Coraline‘s original release. Coraline‘s original domestic box office was just $75 million, while its worldwide total was $124 million. Impressive, for sure, but nowhere near the box office totals of any of the other re-releases in their original run.

Coraline had the benefit of being a 3D re-release, meaning the ticket prices on it were higher than the other films, which were all in standard format. Yet, 3D might have been a big selling point for many, as 3D in Coraline is considered by many to be one of the best uses of technology, and alongside Avatar, which came out ten months later, was a big part of the 3D boom of the early 2010s. Coraline‘s opening weekend for its release came pretty close to the 2022 rerelease of Avatar, which brought in $10 million in its opening weekend. That means there was only a $2 million separation between the re-release of Coraline and the highest-grossing film of all time.

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It speaks to how Coraline has grown over the years and gained a passionate cult following, much like Henry Sellick’s other stop-motion classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas. The Nightmare Before Christmas proved to be so popular that Disney has made it an annual holiday tradition to rerelease the movie in theaters because they knew the fanbase was strong enough to generate a healthy return at the box office. For many, they wanted the chance to see Coraline on the big screen again for the first time in fifteen years. For others, this might have been their first time seeing one of their favorite films on a big screen.