The fifth-highest-grossing film of all time is proving to be a Halloween bonanza.

Frozen, an animated Disney musical about an orphaned princess and her quest for acceptance, has produced a line of dresses and shoes, wigs and crowns, that vendors — including the Disney store in Times Square — are having a tough time keeping in stock.

“The stuff sells out even before retailers are able to bring it into the store, people are buying it straight out of the boxes,” says Harold Chizick, a 20-year veteran of the toy industry whose company, ChizComm, represents Jakks Pacific, a manufacturer of Frozen merchandise that has made tens of millions of dollars from the film’s paraphernalia.

“For Halloween, Frozen is going to be just massive, but the phenomenon is much more than that — in terms of hype and excitement, I’d say that Frozen is for girls what Star Wars was for boys. It’s driving folks back into toy stores.”

Released last November, the film’s original screenplay was first completed in the 1990s. Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the original Frozen cast Anna as a boy, with Elsa taking on the villain role. The music, meanwhile, would have been incidental as opposed to the film’s driving narrative force.

At the time, musicals were out of fashion and conventional wisdom held that a female protagonist couldn’t carry a film.

Tom Sito, a “golden age” Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King, credits Frozen’s success to a confluence of conditions: an audience who had mostly abandoned Disney for Pixar, and thus could still find their format fresh; the music by Broadway’s Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez; and a punchy, poignant screenplay that aimed its sharp humour at the intended audience, not their parents.

“Every animated feature is a high-stakes gamble: It might do gangbusters or it might just lay an egg,” says Sito, currently a professor of cinema at University of South California and author of the books Drawing the Line and Moving Innovation.

“You think you know what the formula is — until somebody proves you wrong.”

Sito thinks Frozen will usher in a new era of animated musicals and that kids dressed as Elsa, Anna and Sven the reindeer will be asking for candy for years.

“Little Mermaid merchandise was selling four years later as furiously as the year we came out and I think the characters from Frozen will be around for a while,” he says. “Disney knows how to market. I remember Roy Disney used to tell us that if there’s $100-million in holiday box office, our job is to get most of it. This year, bingo — Frozen hit.”

Frozen won Oscars for best animated feature and original song and has enjoyed largely critical praise.

Even before adding up the Halloween costume receipts — and Frozen gear, where in stock, is available at such giants as Target, Walmart and Amazon — the sales figures have been huge. The film grossed more than US$1.2-billion worldwide, increasing Disney’s per-share earnings and raising their movie division’s operating income by 48%.

But that’s just ticket receipts. Frozen swag, which ranges from snow cone makers to stickers, tea sets to telephones, should easily bring in another few billion dollars, says toy man Harold Chizick.

What’s more, at the 2015 toy fair in Dallas, Chizick met with manufacturers who intend to jam even more Frozen product on the shelves in the new year.

“For the past five to seven years, flat had been the new positive in the toy space,” Chizick says. “Frozen turned an entire industry around.”

So the next challenge for Disney, of course, will be how to keep milking its cash cow. The film’s creative team — directors Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck, and songwriters Lopez and Anderson-Lopez — have already wrapped Frozen Forever, an animated short premièring this spring.

Over on the Disney-owned ABC television network, the prime-time drama Once Upon a Time added Elsa and Anna to its mix of classic fairy-tale characters. It also seems likely that Frozen will be theatre-bound. Like The Lion King, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, development has begun for taking the film to the stage.

But all of these plans are cold comfort to the parents still in the market for a light-blue Elsa dress or a tiara that twinkles like a little girl’s eyes when she first sees the film.

It seems all signs point to the juggernaut’s continued world dominance, although Sito insists audiences can be fickle, and even the best-loved hit machines can run aground eventually. He says that even when audiences feel a bond to a picture as strongly as Anna’s and Elsa’s, the creators know it’s only a matter of time until the characters are part of a Halloween costume line that can’t move off the shelf.

“On the outside looking in, you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, these guys turn out hit after hit,’ but on the inside, it’s more like, ‘Oh God, how long is this going to last?’” Sito says.

“You keep wondering when the gravy train is going to stop. And Frozen is great, it’s wonderful, but people in this town who run on hubris find themselves out on the street pretty fast.”