'Frozen 2' breaks most-watched animated movie trailer record

Disney is so gifted at dropping trailers we wouldn’t be surprised if its next trick was to walk on water. That’s a reference both to the skills of Jesus Christ and the first Frozen 2 teaser. But you knew that, because you’ve already watched the trailer – we all have.

116.4M film fans watched the teaser in its first 24 hours, which beat the previous animated movie trailer record, which is also held by Disney (who own Pixar, Marvel, and the contents of your wallet), thanks to Incredibles 2’s 113.6M views.

It’s the latest 24 hour trailer view record for the studio; Avengers: Endgame achieved the all-time record back in December with 289M views, followed by Avengers: Infinity War (238M views), and The Lion King, which drew 224.6M views, in third place.

Of course, The Lion King is all-CGI, so we’re still not quite sure how it counts as live action, and if it had been classified as animation, it would be way ahead of Frozen 2, but that’s an argument for another day.

Frozen 2 will have plenty of time to beat its own record, as it’s not released in UK and US cinemas until 22 November, 2019 – so we’ll see a couple more trailers before then.

We’d certainly like to see a bit more plot next time, as currently all we know about the story comes from the (slight) synopsis: ‘Elsa the Snow Queen and her sister embark on an adventure far away from the kingdom of Arendelle.’

Still, before we build Disney a celebratory snowman in honour of their success, Deadline have pointed out that not all of those views are organic; many of them come from auto-playing videos that appear on the timelines of people who’d rather spend the winter cryogenically frozen than step into a cinema to watch the follow-up to the greatest animated musical of all time (shut up, it is).

That said, if you’re prepared to bet against Frozen 2 breaking all sorts of box office records when it is released on 22 November in the UK, then you’re a braver Hans than us.

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