'Lilo and Stitch's box office shows Disney the power of millennial nostalgia'

Yahoo

6 days ago

Lilo and Stitch is already a box office smash hit. The live-action spin on Disney's 2002 animated classic earned an enormous $341m (£252m) worldwide in its opening weekend and, in the US, it scored the biggest Memorial Day start in history. In four days, it has already out-grossed the entire lifetime run of Snow White — Disney's previous live-action remake.
So, naturally, the execs at Disney will be looking to extract some lessons from this mammoth windfall. The first lesson, obviously, will be to give a green light — or possibly a blue one — to a Lilo and Stitch sequel, probably before this week is out. The second lesson should be to take on board the fact that millennials are now the key to Disney's success.
Take a look at the most successful of the studio's live-action remakes. Three of the top four are related to movies first released in the 1990s — The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin — with 2000s favourite Lilo and Stitch soon to join them. The remake of late-80s favourite The Little Mermaid, which was ultimately perceived as a little bit of a disappointment, still managed a very strong Memorial Day opening of $117.5m (£86.8m) domestically.
Obviously, part of this is just because those are remakes of some of the best Disney animations ever made. It's significant that The Jungle Book, despite being a reimagining of a film from 1967, is the other movie to make up that top four. However, the other thing to note is that Disney should be looking at who loved those films first time around — and how old they are now.
Most researchers use birth years between 1981 and 1996 as the definition of millennial. Someone born in 1989 — the midpoint of that range — will have been five years old when The Lion King came out, and therefore the perfect age to become obsessed by it. Now, in 2025, that hypothetical person will be 36 and very likely a parent to someone who is now around that perfect Disney age.
Read more: How Disney has kept Lilo and Stitch alive for 23 years (Yahoo Entertainment, 4 min read)
Disney's best key to success is to aim movies at parents, rather than grandparents brought up on the older wave of the studio's classics. By pressing the button marked Lilo and Stitch, Disney is now aiming smartly at the younger end of the millennial bracket — after all, it has been eight years since that Beauty and the Beast remake. A new spin on 1997's Hercules, which has Aladdin's Guy Ritchie attached, will also hit this demographic.
Millennials are an obsessive generation, with their love for various franchises and characters incubated in the crucible of fandom that was early social media. They're the reason Lilo and Stitch has been a merchandising phenomenon for the last 20 years and their affection for memes transformed DreamWorks franchise Shrek from a well-liked animation series to a bona fide cultural juggernaut. When Shrek 5 lands in 2026, it will smash through box office records like a rampaging ogre.
Read more: Disney's Lilo & Stitch remake called "biggest surprise" of the year by critics (Digital Spy, 10 min read)
Disney has also realised this with Star Wars, focusing plenty of its recent Disney+ series on prodding at nostalgia for the prequel movies — Hayden Christensen is suddenly everywhere — and the animated Star Wars shows that proliferated in the 2000s. While 80s nostalgia was once king in Hollywood — Stranger Things being the most prominent example — the baton is being passed to the younger millennials.
Other franchises have learned this too. The reason they can't stop making Jurassic Park movies is because the original trilogy landed at the right time to scare the pants off the millennial generation. Just three years after Jurassic World Dominion seemed to mark the end of an era, Universal is excavating the barely-buried fossil already for this summer's Jurassic World Rebirth.
The time has come for millennials to take centre stage in the nostalgia spotlight, and Hollywood has started to pay attention. Ultimately, studios like Disney and Universal will go where the money is and, increasingly, the dollars are in favour of the younger millennial crowd. For Disney animation, though, that's not the most fertile ground. Does anyone really want a live-action Brother Bear or Chicken Little?
Read more: Lilo & Stitch team share behind the scenes secret to filming beloved alien (Yahoo Entertainment, 7 min read)
Disney, instead, is doing something strange. The next live-action remake on the docket, coming to cinemas in July 2026, is of Moana — a movie that, by the time the remake arrives, will only be a decade old. Perhaps Hollywood is done with millennials already and decided to embrace Gen Z. There will be a Skibidi Toilet movie on the way next. Oh wait.
Lilo and Stitch is in UK cinemas now.