Disney’s live-action adaptations are off to a sleepy start at the box office in 2025.
Compared to live-action debuts of the past like “Beauty and the Beast” which opened with $174.7 million, and “The Little Mermaid” which earned $95.5 million, according to USA Today. Disney’s “Snow White” underperformed at the box office this spring.
“Snow White” had an estimated budget of $250 million, and brought in just $42 million in the domestic box office opening weekend and grossed just under $205 million in total sales worldwide, according to IMDb.
With Disney’s recent box office slump, the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” looks to give new life to Disney at the box office this Memorial Day weekend.
How did the original ‘Lilo & Stitch’ do in theaters?
As Disney fans eagerly anticipate the live-action premiere of “Lilo & Stitch” hitting theaters, let‘s rewind and see how the original animation did in its 2002 debut.
With an estimated budget of $80 million, “Lilo & Stitch” wasn’t expected to create a big splash when it hit theaters nationwide June 21, 2002.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Disney was banking on “Treasure Planet,” which would be released later that year, to be the big hit.
Despite Disney’s low confidence in “Lilo & Stitch,” they put their creativity to action through their marketing campaign — a campaign that we have become familiar with in recent months, with Disney’s live-action “Lilo & Stitch.”
Thanks to the creative marketing efforts and the intrigue of what a little blue alien was up to, “Lilo & Stitch” became a box office success, earning approximately $35 million in the domestic box office opening weekend, according to IMDb.
With a film budget of $80 million, the film grossed a total of $273 million worldwide, according to IMDb.
Twenty-three years later, Disney fans, critics and movie fanatics are still talking about the iconic 2002 film.
“The story of an incredibly powerful and destructive experimental creature, engineered by a mad scientist from an alien world, who crash-lands on Earth only to find a loving family in Hawaii,” Vulture wrote in 2024. “That jarring discrepancy between the movie’s grand interstellar framework and the gentle, intimate, even understated nature of its story is part of the unorthodox charm of ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ a picture so wonderfully strange that it‘s hard to believe it ever got made.”
How will live-action ‘Lilo & Stitch’ perform at the box office this year?
The much-anticipated live-action remake of the animated classic is projected to gross between $120 and $140 million over Memorial Day weekend, according to Deadline.
The film had an estimated $100 million budget, according to IMDb.