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By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
When you look at a really weird, uncanny image these days, you’re forced to ask the awkward question: “wait, is this AI?” That’s what happened to me the first time I saw an image of Dwayne Johnson from Disney’s live-action Moana movie. It looked for all the world like the kind of low-effort crap you’d get if you just asked ChatGPT to make the former wrestler look like the leading man of Disney’s beloved animated movie. Unfortunately, it was all too real; to my horror, I learned that Disney was going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars making and marketing yet another live-action adaptation.
Like many, I’ve spent years wondering why the House of Mouse makes these lazy films. Why ruin a perfectly good cartoon with a live version that has absolutely none of the charm? Of course, as long as these movies were making money, nothing was going to keep the studio from cranking them out. Now, however, after the disaster that was Snow WhiteDisney’s live-action adaptation business may receive another, possibly fatal blow. Not only did critics hate the new Moanabut the movie is set to make a catastrophically low amount of money during its opening weekend.
The Moana Remake Is Already Doomed
To say that critics hate the new Moana is a serious understatement. On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie currently holds a 38 percent, which is insanely low. For comparison, the original Moana currently has a 95 percent critical score. The difference here is like night and day: while the original cartoon was an instant classic, the live-action adaptation is officially “rotten.” On RT, the critical consensus is that the film is “underwhelming” and “lifeless,” especially compared to the “superior adventure” of the original animated movie.
Of course, bad reviews mean nothing if a movie makes enough money, which is why we’ve been getting these cursed, live-action remakes for decades. However, it looks like the Moana remake is going to suffer as much commercially as it has suffered critically. According to Variety, tracking services are predicting that the movie will make between $60-$65 million in North America. However, the site notes that both exhibitors and rival studios think Moana could be like Supergirl and have a worse opening weekend. How worse? They believe the domestic opening could be as low as $40 million.
Navigating Unsteady Waters
Now, the Moana remake will likely do better than Supergirl internationally, where tracking services show the movie earning somewhere between $70-$75 million globally in its opening weekend. However, it’s the domestic success (or lack thereof) that typically predicts whether these live-action remakes will be very profitable. For example, the 2019 Dumbo remake had a domestic opening weekend of $45 million, and 2025’s Snow White had a $42 million domestic opening weekend. Both of those movies went on to lose money at the box office in stark comparison to other remakes like Lilo & Stitchwhich earned over $100 million domestically and went on to earn (like the animated Moana 2) over a billion dollars at the box office.
Will the Moana remake lose Disney money? Only time will tell, but right now, things look pretty grim: the movie has a budget of $250 million, which doesn’t count the high cost of marketing. With the very occasional success story like Obsessionmovies always make less in subsequent weeks after they debut. Right now, the best-case scenario for the Moana remake is that it earns $130 million this weekend. With poor word of mouth (again, 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), the film is likely going to experience a serious revenue decline from week to week. It could ultimately have trouble even meeting its budget, much less making a profit.
It Smells, But The Rock Ain’t Cooking
The same thing happened with Snow White. Between expensive reshoots and absolutely terrible word of mouth, the movie ended up actually losing Disney $170 million. If the Moana remake loses a major amount of money, it might establish a pattern and convince the House of Mouse to stop making these soulless, cash-grabbing remakes. This is the same year that The Mandalorian and Grogu also seriously underperformed, getting defeated at the box office by multiple low-budget horror movies. With any luck, Disney will learn a major lesson from those spooky movies: namely, that making money means actually making something original.
Disney is currently making yet another expensive mistake, but at least my advice to the studio is free. As Dwayne Johnson might say in an uncanny, shot-for-shot remake while wearing an impossibly dumb muscle suit, “What can I say, except ‘you’re welcome?’”
