How A Critically Trashed Box Office Bomb Become Disney’s Most Popular Halloween Movie

Kathy Najimy, Bette Midler and Sarah Jessica Parker in Walt Disney's 'Hocus Pocus' Disney

Fandango is announcing that Hocus Pocus has been their most-watched Halloween flick on Vudu for the last five years in a row. The Kenny Ortega-directed flick, about three witches that come back to life on Halloween night, had a mini-boom last weekend, nabbing $1.925 million in theatrical earnings to place second behind Tenet’s $2.7 million fifth-weekend gross and being Disney DIS +’s most-watched movie over that same weekend. So how did a critically-trashed commercial flop ($39 million domestic on a $28 million budget) from the summer of 1993 become a perennial Halloween favorite? Blame generational nostalgia and some of the very elements for which it was maligned back in the day, and its envelope-pushing existence in a time before every big movie was PG-13 and intended for everyone.

This isn’t the part where I say that the critics got it wrong in 1993, because they didn’t. Then and now, Hocus Pocus is a painfully unfocused movie, with blank-slate kid protagonists (Omri Katz as a skeptical middle-schooler and Vinessa Shaw as his crush) and a trio of overqualified adult actors (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy) who stand around and overact at each other. To be fair, one smart thing David Kirschner and Mick Garris’ otherwise unwieldy screenplay does is to have Shaw take an immediate liking to the new kid in town, so Katz doesn’t have to win over his lady love and/or prove himself. Otherwise, I would argue that the idea of Hocus Pocus is far more enjoyable than the actual theatrical feature.

Najimy had just broken out in Whoopi Goldberg’s blockbuster Sister Act the summer before, and Parker was trying to build a resume after her breakout in Steve Martin’s modern classic LA Story early 1991. Midler has noted that this was one of her favorite roles, and that certainly squares with the “stand her and do whatever the hell you want” structure. Whatever entertainment value the film offers is mostly in watching its star trio riff amongst each other. The other adults certainly aren’t of much help, and the only other character who has any depth is Thora Birch as Max’s little sister as well as Jason Marsden as a talking cat. Not every mediocre movie has to be reevaluated and retroactively proclaimed to be an underappreciated classic.

As for the film’s post-theatrical popularity, it benefited from repeated airings on Disney owned channels (ABC Family, Disney Channel, etc.) and became a generational favorite not unlike prior box office whiffs like The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life. You could say the same about A Christmas Story, but that November 1983 release earned $20 million on a $3.3 million budget before slowly becoming a TV-driven holiday favorite. Ditto The Nightmare Before Christmas, which was absolutely a hit in 1993 ($50 million domestic on a $18 million budget) before becoming a generational classic via theatrical reissues and Disney’s eventual embrace of the film that so terrified them (they were afraid of another Batman Returns-style parental backlash) that they released it under the Touchtone banner.

And yes, it’s hard to see how this sort of development, with an unsuccessful theatrical release getting a second lease on life via repeated TV airings, can happen in the modern streaming era, but I digress. At least some of its popularity stems from its existence in a time when there were distinctly grown-up movies with adult content and strictly for-kids movies that were often more valuable to parents for what they didn’t contain (violence, scariness, sexual content, etc.) than for what they did offer. This wasn’t a time when everything, from ultraviolent action movies to kid-friendly fantasies, ended up with a PG-13 and everything was pitched as a four-quadrant global blockbuster. As such, a movie like Hocus Pocus would stand out to its young theatrical audiences.

It was a PG-rated Disney movie starring witches who murdered children, with a plot that revolved around the male protagonist’s virginity and a certain comfort with pubescent lusting and grown-up thirst (Parker is super horny throughout). Some of the critical barbs flung its way at the time concerned pearl-clutching outrage that a kids flick would feature the very elements that helped make it a kiddie classic. Yes, this PG-rated Disney flick featured onscreen child murder (the film opens with a girl getting the life sucked out of her), unapologetic teen horniness (the film seems to be rooting for Katz and Shaw to deflower each other) and Parker’s cleavage-y and innuendo-y witch designed to be a kid’s first cinematic crush (too late, Ortega, I had already seen LA Story!).

But those very variables were a big part of why the film appealed to kids too old for Dennis the Menace but too young for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Many/most of the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s kid flicks that have stood the test of time, think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Grease, The Monster Squad, Labyrinth, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Goonies and/or The Rocketeer, stood out specifically because they were “too scary,” “too profane,” “too violent,” “too horny” and/or seemingly breaking the rules of what constituted wholesome kids-targeted feature films. In a time just before “all audiences” movies like Independence Day and The Fellowship of the Ring took over Hollywood, the kids films that stood out were the ones that took their PG ratings very seriously.

In a world where kids show up for ultraviolent PG-13 action fantasies like The Hunger Games or Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the spirit of Hocus Pocus lives on in movies like ParaNorman and Maleficent which, differential quality notwithstanding, stand out by being unafraid to make their target demographics a little afraid. Alas, most PG-13 movies are usually embarrassingly chaste thanks to changing cultural standards, so that’s one way in which the PG-rated Hocus Pocus still stands out from the pack. Its generational popularity is another good reason to still try to make original movies now and then even in an IP-driven culture. Love it or hate it, Walt Disney’s Hocus Pocus has withstood the test of time by being different from its competition and embracing its transgressions.