Disney international phenomenon Frozen has finally reached the coveted $1 billion milestone. And it hasn’t even been released in all countries yet!
The film has now made $1,000,236,000 worldwide. $388.7 million of the total was made domestically, with $611.5 million made in foreign markets.
Frozen has been inching toward this massive finish line for a while now, but finally succeeded. It was predicted and expected that Frozen would inevitably reach $1 billion after opening in its final market–Japan–on March 14, but it looks like Frozen couldn’t wait that long.
We all scoffed when we saw Disney using the line “the greatest Disney musical event since The Lion King” in its marketing. Nothing can touch The Lion King. Boy were we wrong. It just passed The Lion King‘s 20-year-old record $987.5 million record.
Frozen is now the second highest grossing animated film of all time behind Pixar’s Toy Story 3, which made $1.063 billion back in 2010. Now the real question is if Frozen will make that extra $63 million it needs to claim the title of highest grossing animated film of all time. Also, Frozen is now 18th on the highest grossing films of all time.
Disney did a lot to keep Frozen in the spotlight, after its initial word-of-mouth success after its first month in theatres. The studio “re-released” Frozen as a sing-along edition (even though, technically, the film never left theatres), which brought diehard fans back again to see the film. The viral popularity of the Frozen‘s big musical number “Let It Go”, allowed the studio to conduct a massive sing-along on Good Morning America, which involved singers from the film and from other popular YouTube videos of the song.
In its 15th week in theatres, Frozen still managed to make an impressive $3.611 million over the weekend. With a predicted Oscar win today for Best Animated Feature, it might help to further bolster Frozen‘s domestic box office run in the coming weeks. It seems likely that it will surpass Toy Story 3‘s any day now.
Congratulations to the entire Disney Animation team for this incredible achievement!
