'Frozen,' Disney's New Fairy Tale, Is No. 2 at Box Office

LOS ANGELES - Billboards that buried the princesses in snow. TV ads that emphasized action and screwball comedy while playing down romance and sisterhood. Trailers that concealed the Broadway-style musical numbers.

Was it enough to convince boys that 'Frozen' is not just for girls?

And then some: Walt Disney Studios said that its latest animated fairy tale took in an estimated $93 million between Wednesday and Sunday - one of the best Thanksgiving debuts on record, according to box-office analysts. The movie, which received an A-plus score from ticket buyers in exit polls, notably faces no major animated competition through the Christmas holiday.

As expected, the No. 1 movie in North America over the five-day weekend was 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.' Released by Lionsgate, 'Catching Fire' took in an estimated $110.2 million, for a two-week domestic total of $296.5 million, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data.

A blockbuster response to 'Frozen,' about two princess sisters and a wisecracking snowman named Olaf, was less of a sure thing. To justify the film's cost - roughly $250 million in production and global marketing expenses - Disney needed 'Frozen' to charm everyone. The studio was confident that girls would show up, but it was scared that boys would take one look and respond with a sneer: Eww, a princess movie.

That concern became deeply ingrained at Disney after the 2009 release of 'The Princess and the Frog,' which was a box-office dud; studio research indicated that boys recoiled in part because of the word princess in the title. Disney decided to give its next fairy tale musical, centered on Rapunzel, the gender-neutral title 'Tangled,' prompting a mini-controversy.

For 'Frozen,' very loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale 'The Snow Queen,' Disney's marketing ploys seemed to work. About 43 percent of the opening-weekend audience for the movie was male, according to exit polls. To compare, the first weekend of 'Tangled' drew a crowd that was 39 percent male.

'Boys really respond to humor, and we fortunately had an enormous supply of that from Olaf the snowman,' said Dave Hollis, executive vice president for distribution at Walt Disney Studios. Addressing the marketing campaign, Mr. Hollis said that Disney tested materials with focus groups, and 'with any piece that polarized one audience or another, there was a strategic decision to hold it.'

The success of 'Frozen' means much more to Disney than box-office receipts. The company's theme parks rely on hit music from its movies, for instance, and Disney has recently shied away from full-blown musicals. As a leading Oscar contender for best animated film, 'Frozen' also cements a Pixar-led turnaround at the historic but in recent times lagging Walt Disney Animation Studios.

'To see the impact of John's creative oversight has really been extraordinary,' Mr. Hollis said, referring to John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder who took over Disney's animation operation in 2006.

Princess-related merchandise generates billions of dollars in revenue for Disney. Items tied to the 'Frozen' sisters, Anna and Elsa, voiced by Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel, and Olaf, voiced by Josh Gad, are hot holiday gifts, retailers say. (Anna and Elsa, for the record, have not joined the likes of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty as 'official' Disney princesses.)

With so much on the line, Disney fired up its vaunted cross-marketing engines. 'Frozen' had a titanic presence on Disney Channel; costumed characters were deployed to the Norway pavilion at Epcot at Walt Disney World; the movie's central showstopping song, 'Let It Go,' written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Bobby Lopez ( 'The Book of Mormon,' 'Avenue Q'), became the centerpiece of the Disneyland Resort's World of Color fountain extravaganza. There was even a 12-city 'Frozen' hash brown giveaway sponsored by Ore-Ida.

For the five-day weekend, 'Thor: The Dark World' (Disney) was third at theaters, taking in about $15.5 million, for a four-week total of $186.7 million. 'The Best Man Holiday' (Universal) was fourth, selling an estimated $11.1 million, for a three-week total of $63.4 million. And with a script by Sylvester Stallone, 'Homefront' (Open Road) arrived in fifth place, taking in about $9.8 million.

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