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 the 15th anniversary re-release of the hit 2009 film, Coraline. Directed by The Nightmare Before Christmas‘ Henry Selick, Coraline is based on the 2002 novella of the same name by Neil Gaiman. The film follows 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.

According to Deadline, the re-release brought in $8.3 million dollars, taking the number five spot at the box office. This is notably better than other 2024 anniversary re-releases 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), and even the 45th anniversary of Alien ($1.5 million).

With the release of Wendell & Wild, here’s a look at famed stop-motion animation director Henry Selick’s best movies.

Coraline‘s opening weekend nearly matched the 25th-anniversary re-release 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’s opening weekend compared to other high-profile releases of 2024.

Title	Re-Release Opening Weekend	Theater Count	Release Date	Anniversary Celebrating
Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace	$8,723,194	2,700	May 2, 2024	25th Anniversary
Coraline	$8,391,479	1,564	August 15, 2024	15th Anniversary
Alien	$1,550,424	1,750	April 26, 2024	45th Anniversary
Shrek 2	$1,455,260	1,512	April 12, 2024	20th Anniversary
The Lion King	$1,055,070	1,330	July 12, 2024	30th Anniversary
The Mummy	$1,026,760	1,236	April 26, 2024	25th Anniversary

Coraline Takes on Much Bigger Movies & Wins

Coraline

Release Date: February 5, 2009
Director: Henry Selick
Runtime: 100
Studio: Focus Features
Tagline: Oh. My. Gosh.

What makes Coraline‘s opening re-release so impressive is how the original film compared to all of those other movies, which generally had much bigger profiles. 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. They were behemoths compared to Coraline, so it’s interesting to consider why, in 2024, Selick’s film outperformed such heavy-hitters.

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 Coraline is considered by many to have some of the most impressive 3D, 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 re-release 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.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane Poster & Coraline.

An adaptation of the beloved children’s book by Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is now in development.

It speaks to how Coraline has grown over the years and gained a passionate cult following, much like Henry Selick’s other stop-motion classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, which proved to be so popular that Disney has made it an annual holiday tradition to re-release the movie in theaters. Who knows, maybe re-releasing Coraline will become a summer tradition so that people can experience the film on the big screen, either for the first time or again after many years.

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