A soft opening, a brutal Rotten Tomatoes score, and a star-making performance are all part of the same story this weekend.
Disney’s live-action remake of “Moana” hit theaters Friday and did what a big franchise movie is supposed to do: it topped the box office. Normally that’s the whole story — mission accomplished, roll credits. This weekend, finishing first came with a pretty large asterisk.
A Slow Leak in the Numbers
The trouble started weeks before anyone bought a ticket. Early tracking in June had “Moana” pegged for a domestic opening as high as $80 million to $105 million. By last week that estimate had slid to $60 million–$65 million. By Thursday, some rival studios were already whispering numbers closer to $40 million. Each version was lower than the last, and reality landed near the bottom: Thursday preview screenings brought in $4.5 million, Friday’s total (previews included) reached about $18 million, and the film is on track to finish its opening weekend somewhere around $45 million to $47 million domestically.
For comparison, that’s barely ahead of the original 2016 animated “Moana,” which opened to $56.6 million over Thanksgiving weekend nearly a decade ago — without a decade of brand recognition or a $200 million-plus budget behind it. It’s nowhere near “Moana 2,” the 2024 animated sequel that opened to a record $139.7 million and eventually crossed $1 billion worldwide. And it lands awkwardly close to “Snow White,” last year’s live-action remake that became shorthand for Disney’s remake troubles after opening to $42.7 million and finishing with just $205.6 million worldwide.
| Film | Domestic Opening | Worldwide Total |
|---|---|---|
| Moana (2016, animated) | $56.6M | $680M+ |
| Moana 2 (2024, animated) | $139.7M | $1.06B |
| Snow White (2025, live-action) | $42.7M | $205.6M |
| Moana (2026, live-action) | ~$45–47M (est.) | TBD |
Reports peg the new film’s production budget between $200 million and $250 million before marketing — Disney hasn’t confirmed an exact number. Analysts estimate it needs somewhere around $600 million to $625 million worldwide just to break even. International audiences are expected to add another $70 million to $75 million on top of the domestic weekend, but even a generous overseas haul leaves “Moana” with a long swim ahead of it.
Why Didn’t People Show Up?
Part of it is simply timing. Families at the multiplex this month already have options: “Toy Story 5” is in its fourth weekend and closing in on $400 million domestically, Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” is still holding a top-five spot, and a new “Evil Dead” movie opened the very same day, splitting the horror crowd away from nothing in particular but adding to a genuinely packed slate. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” arrives next weekend, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” lands July 31, and “Avengers: Doomsday” looms in December as the industry’s presumptive heavyweight of the year — the film most analysts expect to be 2026’s single biggest earner. Squeezed between that many big swings, “Moana” had less room to breathe than Disney may have hoped.
But the bigger issue is a question a lot of people have been asking out loud online: why does this movie need to exist? The animated “Moana” is ten years old, not fifty. Its sequel was in theaters less than two years ago and made over a billion dollars. Critics and casual moviegoers alike have pointed out that the new version follows the same story, the same songs, and largely the same shots as the original, right down to individual lines of dialogue. Disney could at least argue that last year’s “Snow White” was revisiting an 88-year-old film overdue for a refresh. That argument doesn’t really hold up for a movie whose original stars are still young enough to help promote the remake.
Critics Weren’t Impressed. Families Mostly Were.
When reviews went live Wednesday morning, “Moana” opened in the low 30s on Rotten Tomatoes and climbed into the high 30s as more reviews rolled in, eventually settling around 37 to 38 percent — one of the lower scores in Disney’s fifteen-year run of live-action remakes, though not literally the worst (that distinction still belongs to 2022’s “Pinocchio”). Metacritic landed at a similarly lukewarm 42.
The most common complaint was the one already mentioned: this “Moana” doesn’t do much the original didn’t already do first, and arguably better. Several reviewers compared its visual style unfavorably to the exaggerated, expressive character animation of 2016, noting that live-action performers simply can’t move the way animated ones can — a limitation that showed up most clearly in Dwayne Johnson’s Maui, whose big musical number felt noticeably more restrained than his cartoon counterpart’s. The design choices divided even family audiences before opening day; some parents online noted their own kids seemed unmoved by early looks at the live-action characters, a small but telling sign for a franchise built on winning over exactly that crowd. Not every critic piled on — Variety’s Owen Gleiberman was among those who called it one of the more enjoyable entries in Disney’s remake catalog.
Almost everyone agreed on one thing: newcomer Catherine Laga’aia is a find. Even reviews that trashed the movie overall singled out her performance, and regular moviegoers seemed to agree — the film earned an A- CinemaScore from opening-night audiences, matching 2024’s well-liked “Mufasa” and beating the B+ that “Snow White” managed last year. That kind of gap between critics and audiences sometimes signals a movie with real staying power, the sort that grows through word of mouth rather than a marketing blitz. A few critics also found something worth celebrating in the story itself: the film’s handling of Te Fiti, the island goddess whose stolen heart sets the plot in motion, drew praise from writers who connected her to a broader pop-culture moment for powerful, nurturing earth-mother figures — the same instinct that’s made characters like Pandora’s Eywa in “Avatar” resonate with audiences well beyond their franchises.
A Star Is Born, Even If the Opening Wasn’t
Easy to lose in the box office chatter: a genuinely good story. Catherine Laga’aia, the 19-year-old Sydney-born actress now playing Moana, was cast at 17 after beating out more than 32,000 other applicants in an open casting call. She’s the daughter of Jay Laga’aia, a familiar face from the “Star Wars” prequels and Australian television, and she’s of Samoan and English descent — heritage that clearly mattered to a production leaning hard into cultural authenticity. She finished her high school exams remotely while shooting the film. This is her first movie credit.
The world premiere, held at the Hollywood Bowl the Tuesday before release, leaned into that significance even further. Roughly 5,000 guests watched the LA Philharmonic perform the score live as the film played, following a set from the Nonosina dancers and a traditional Polynesian ceremony performed on stage by Johnson and Laga’aia together. Johnson, who is of Samoan descent himself, brought his mother and daughters to the event and had asked director Thomas Kail to write them a small cameo into the finished film — a three-generation moment he later called deeply personal. Auli’i Cravalho, who voiced Moana in both animated films and stayed on as an executive producer here, used the night to formally pass the role to Laga’aia, telling the crowd how proud she was to see a young Pacific Islander actress carry the story forward. For a lot of people involved, this was never just another remake — it was a rare mainstream showcase for Polynesian performers and storytelling on one of the biggest stages Hollywood has to offer, and that part of the weekend played very differently than the box office chart did.
A Rough Stretch for The Rock
The soft opening is an especially awkward beat for Dwayne Johnson, who was hoping “Moana” would be his return to reliable blockbuster territory. His last two big swings didn’t go the way he’d planned: 2022’s “Black Adam” underperformed against its own hype, and last October’s “The Smashing Machine” — a dramatic detour into awards-season territory, with Johnson playing real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr — opened to a career-low $5.9 million despite strong reviews and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance. Christopher Nolan, of all people, publicly called it one of the best performances of the year. None of that translated into ticket sales.
Johnson has grossed more than $15 billion globally across his career and remains one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars on paper. But “Moana” was supposed to be the sure thing after two years of uncertain bets, and instead it’s opening in the same conversation as “Snow White.” Johnson doesn’t seem rattled by it — he confirmed at a press event in Rio de Janeiro earlier this month that a third animated “Moana” film is already in development, independent of how this one performs.
What Happens Now
A soft opening weekend isn’t necessarily fatal, especially for a family film with few direct competitors until “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” at month’s end. If that A- CinemaScore turns into real word of mouth, “Moana” could take the slow road to profitability the way the original did — helped along by international grosses, theme park tie-ins, and an eventual move to Disney+, where the 2016 film remains one of the platform’s most-watched titles nearly a decade later.
The bigger question is what this means for Disney’s live-action remake strategy going forward. A “Tangled” remake is already in the works, but that one has the benefit of distance — its animated original came out in 2010 and never got a sequel, giving audiences sixteen years to miss it rather than two. Whether Disney reads “Moana’s” muted reception as a signal to slow down, or just a rough weekend in an otherwise durable pipeline, is the conversation happening in boardrooms this week. For Laga’aia, whatever the final numbers say, the door this movie opened for her career is already wide open.
