Hocus Pocus 2's Bewitching Debut Just Made Disney+ History
You never know how a belated sequel will be received by an audience decades after the original. There are plenty of examples of cultishly adored films from the old days getting shiny new sequels only to be disappointments at the box office (not to mention those more timely sequels that were never supposed to exist in the first place). Perhaps these types of projects are safer bets in the streaming world, where a fond memory of an old movie is enough to inspire a comfy home viewer to click "play" on the remote.
Or maybe, "Hocus Pocus 2," sequel to 1993's "Hocus Pocus" starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy as the witchy Sanderson sisters, is simply good enough to have made history on the Disney+ streaming platform where it recently made its debut. Parker already revealed that the project necessitated a lot of hard creative work before it could even get off the ground, and it appears that work has paid off in a big way.
The sequel just had the best US debut in the history of Disney+
The milestone was announced directly by the official Disney+ Twitter account itself: "Hocus Pocus 2" is the "#1 film premiere on Disney+ in the US to date," said to be based on the total number of hours watched across the country over the first three days of the film's availability on the platform.
That's a somewhat involved way of saying that more viewers in the United States watched the premiere of "Hocus Pocus 2" than have watched any other Disney+ premiere — an impressive feat no matter how you look at it.
With success like that, it's natural to wonder whether there might be yet a third "Hocus Pocus" movie in the works, this one being on a quicker release timeline than the nearly 30 years that elapsed between "Hocus Pocus" and "Hocus Pocus 2." Nothing's been greenlit yet, but the cast of the movie did talk the prospect over with Yahoo, and it seems like Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy are all game — if the script passes muster.
But that's all in the realm of the hypothetical. For now, "Hocus Pocus 2" fans should be content to bask in the fact that they helped give the movie the most successful premiere on Disney+ to date.