LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – JULY 07: Catherine Laga’aia and Dwayne Johnson attend the world premiere of Moana at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California, on July 07, 2026. (Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for Disney)
Getty Images for Disney
Disney’s live-action version of Moana has stumbled badly in theaters, prompting plenty of debate over what went wrong. The reasons range from a screenplay that reportedly hews too closely to the 2016 animated hit to a release window that arrived less than two years after Moana 2.
The weak performance has revived a bigger question: what, exactly, is the draw of live-action remakes when the stories already exist in beloved animated form? Universal and Disney both found success with the format in 2025 through How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, respectively. But Disney’s Moana is projected to lose between $100 million and $125 million. The line between a profitable remake and a box office misfire often comes down to whether the new version offers audiences a compelling reason to buy a ticket instead of simply streaming the animated original at home.
Dissecting The ‘Moana’ Debacle
Reviewers were largely unimpressed with Moana, which landed at a 34% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Ticket buyers, however, were far more receptive. The film received an A- CinemaScore, with women giving it a solid A and viewers under 18 awarding it an A+. On Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter, Moana reached a 90% approval rating among verified ticket buyers, even surpassing the audience score for the animated original. In other words, the people who showed up generally liked what they saw.
The audience profile was notably narrow. Women accounted for 66% of moviegoers, while 56% identified as parents attending with children. Women over 25 delivered the strongest response on PostTrak, giving the movie a 78% definite-recommend score, the highest of any measured demographic, while women overall posted a 70% definite recommend. Children under 12 represented the largest single age group, making up 28% of the audience. Taken together, the data points to a family-heavy turnout led largely by mothers and younger children already attached to Moana, with limited crossover beyond that core crowd.
So far, though, that core audience has not been large enough to support the film’s steep price tag. Moana could become a turning point that slows Disney’s live-action remake strategy, or merely a major setback in a long-running cycle. The approach itself is hardly new: Disney released a live-action remake of The Jungle Book in 1994, and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland followed in 2010, among other examples. Nor is Moana the first high-profile remake to struggle.
Live-Action Films At A Crossroads
Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, both released in 2025, show how the formula can still work when audiences respond. How to Train Your Dragon earned more than $636 million worldwide against a $165 million budget, while Lilo & Stitch topped $1 billion globally. Yet those successes sit alongside a string of costly disappointments, including Snow White (2025), The Little Mermaid (2023), Dumbo (2019) and now Moana. The contrast between the hits and the misses points to several key factors:
Timing Is Everything
A remake needs distance from its original to feel like an event instead of a rerun. Cinderella (2015), Beauty and the Beast(2017), Aladdin (2019) and The Lion King (2019) all arrived 25 years or more after their animated originals. The 2016 version of Moana was still the most-streamed movie on any platform every year from 2020 through 2024, and Moana 2gave audiences a new chapter of the same story less than two years before the live-action version arrived. Ten years on a calendar doesn’t create distance if the original never left the cultural conversation.
Timing also comes down to when the movie is released during the summer. Moana also faced competition from two other family-oriented movies, Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters. Toy Story 5 was a particularly strong competitor. Aladdin and The Lion King overlapped somewhat with Toy Stoy 4, but there was room enough for all three, as the movies were spaced far enough apart.
The Audience Needs to Get Something Extra
A new song or an expanded scene gives a moviegoer a specific reason to believe they will see more than what they already own. How to Train Your Dragon added roughly 30 minutes of new material. Beauty and the Beast featured three new songs and grossed $1.26 billion. Aladdin gave Jasmine a new song, “Speechless,” built for a character who had none in the original, and grossed $1.05 billion. Moana added one song, played over the closing credits, attached to a script that followed the 2016 film scene for scene.
The Live-Action Remake Actually Has to Deliver Live Action
Moana leaned so heavily on visual effects, close to 2,000 shots to build its ocean and a demigod’s transformations, that several critics said the finished film looked more animated than live. A remake that ends up looking like the animated feature it was based on gives an audience no reason to choose a theater over the version they can stream at home.
None of this mattered as much a decade ago. From 2015 to 2019, watching a beloved character rendered photorealistically was new enough on its own to pull people into a theater. That novelty is gone now. The format no longer buys it a pass.
‘Moana’ Has a Future Beyond the Box Office
A weak theatrical run has not hurt every recent Disney remake for long. Snow White lost an estimated $170 million in theaters, then debuted at the top of Disney+’s viewership chart when it arrived on the service in June 2025. Samba TV measured a 405% jump in viewership over the film’s first five days of streaming compared with its earlier premium on-demand release, and the film held a spot on FlixPatrol’s global top 10 list for 67 days. It’s possible that on streaming, audiences will be more willing to give the live-action remake a chance especially as the Disney+ algorithm suggests it to audiences who continue to enjoy the original and Moana 2 on streaming. The live-action remake is literally one click away, not a trip to the theater.
Disney’s parks and consumer products businesses give Moana more paths to a return than the box office alone. “Journey of Water, Inspired by Moana,” has run as a walk-through attraction at EPCOT since October 2023, and the character appears in ongoing meet-and-greet experiences at the Aulani resort in Hawaii. Those touchpoints existed before the live-action film and do not depend on how many tickets it sold in its opening weekend. The movie is losing Disney money, but the character underneath it still has other ways to earn it.
