Why Moana’s box office failure could force Disney to rethink its live-action remake strategy

There is no doubt that Moana is beloved.

The plucky heroine of Disney’s 2016 animated feature has gripped imaginations in the 10 years since she debuted with a song in her heart and a love of the ocean. She battled a lava monster, restored her island and saved her people. The demi-god Maui was there too.

She’s amazing. The kids, they love her. As they should.

How much do they love her? Moana and Moana 2 were the two most streamed movies on Disney+ last year. According to The New York Times, Moana has sold 22 million toys, and the music from the films have been played more 26 billion times.

That 2024 sequel, which was reconfigured from originally a TV project, is universally accepted as “just fine” but it still made $US1.05 billion at the global box office.

The answer is heaps, they love her heaps. They love her as much as the Pacific Ocean is vast.

So, why did the Moana live-action film fizzle on its opening weekend? Why is its stumble enough to generate headlines about whether Disney should hang up its live-action remakes?

The box office numbers made for grim accounting.

A US and Canada opening weekend of $US43 million in North America may sound like a lot, but it is barely above last year’s controversy-laden disaster, Snow White, which earnt $US42.2 million.

The result is lower than the projections of $US50 million to $US60 million, which had already been downgraded during pre-release tracking.

In Australia, the opening weekend came in at $5.93 million, but rises to $7.33 million when you factor in Wednesday previews. The international markets totalled $US52 million for a global tally of $US95 million.

The production budget has been reported as $US250 million, and that’s before the cost of marketing and release, which has been estimated at $US100 million-plus. With cinemas taking about half of every ticket, the break-even would be at least $US700 million.

It may still get there if there is a long-tail, as Mufasa: The Lion King had in 2024, which opened at $US35 million in North America and went on to do $US722 million worldwide. There is precedent, and among audiences, Moana could have decent word-of-mouth, scoring an A- in exit polling in the US.

There are also all the Disney ancillary revenue channels, such as its streaming platform, merchandise, theme parks, cruises and live shows, which will continue to capitalise on the characters — although you have to wonder if it will add anything to the existing Moana mania which was still powering all those other products.

But it definitely provokes the question of what was it all for? Why remake an already beloved film if the money isn’t even (potentially) there? Have audiences finally come down with Disney remake fatigue?

Part of it has to do with timing more than any issues with familiarity (Toy Story 5, after four weeks, is already sitting on a $US879 million box office, and last year Zootopia 2 ended up at $US1.87 billion).

Moana is the Disney live-action remake with the shortest span of time from the original release to the new version. It is fresh in everyone’s minds (from rewatching it over and over again on streaming), and the world hasn’t changed enough for there to be a nostalgia factor.

The average length of time for these Disney projects is 27 years. For Moana, it’s been 10. Disney is an animation studio with a 90-year history in features, so Moana is a primary schooler, still one of the newbies.

It also doesn’t offer audiences anything new. It’s a scene-for-scene if not almost shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor. At least Moana 2, for all its faults, was a continuation of the story, and if fans wanted to know what she was getting up to three years after her big adventure, they had to buy a ticket.

This has no sell-point other than, “you love Moana, see the same thing but now with real humans”. If you think of some of Disney’s past commercial successes in this specific genre, it gave compelling reasons for why they existed.

Alice in Wonderland ($US1.02 billion), arguably the first live-action remake of the modern era, was about seeing what someone imaginative like Tim Burton could do with an already fantastical story.

The Jungle Book ($US966 million) offered a natural world built by photorealistic CGI, Maleficent ($US759 million) was a revisionist reclaiming of a villain, and Aladdin ($US1.05 billion) cast a pre-slap Will Smith as the Genie.

What did Moana have? Dwayne Johnson is a star, sure, but we’ve already heard him sing, and even his box office shine has been tarnished in recent years. The Smashing Machine, the sombre wrestling biopic from last year, reinforced that people will not show up just because Johnson is in something.

Hollywood is a risk-averse industry, it will keep making more of the same as long as the cash is rolling in, and as soon as something starts to whiff, it hits the brakes.

When the Disney live-actions were going bananas in the latter half of the 2010s, the studio rushed a bunch more into production. The horizon for them was endless, or so it seemed.

COVID has been a great disruptor to the world in many ways, and one of its effects was it halted the momentum on a bunch of movie genres that were firing in 2019, and now, not so much. In 2019, nine movies ended the year over a $US1 billion, this year there are two so far, and they’ve only just eked over the line.

Since COVID, the only Disney live-action remake to hit that magic mark was Lilo & Stitch last year, which was a huge surprise to everyone.

There had been 23 years since the animated original, which is a sweet spot when it comes to nostalgia for Millennials, it had lived on with DVD sequels and TV shows, and the brand had been a merchandising super force, but it was never considered as part of the pantheon of the Disney classics.

But Snow White ($US205 million) had badly tanked and The Little Mermaid ($US569 million) had underwhelmed. When Snow White’s returns came in, it scared Disney and reportedly caused the studio to pause production on the in-gestation Tangled (2010) live-action remake.

Lilo & Stitch’s success restarted the Tangled production, which has cast Kathryn Hahn as Mother Goethel and is expected to start filming later this year. The release hasn’t been dated yet, and that may not be a bad thing because the other problem is ubiquity.

We live in a world where almost all screen entertainment is accessible with a few clicks (or at least gives the impression it is while, actually, the availability of archival titles is a real challenge), and we’re overwhelmed with choice as new releases scream for attention.

The approach from most studios seem to be inundation, especially as many of them were also trying to grow their in-house streaming platforms. That has the effect of making things that should be special feel run-of-the-mill.

It conveys a message of “more of the same”, here’s yet another Disney live-action remake, and quite a few of those COVID-era retreads (Peter Pan & Wendy, Mulan, Pinocchio, Cruella and Lady and the Tramp) were either released only on streaming or simultaneously on streaming and in cinemas.

Some have tried, but no one has yet to succeed in making a streaming movie release feel like a significant event.

Besides Tangled, there are still more live-action remakes in the pipeline. A new version of Hercules, and sequels to Lilo & Stitch, Maleficent, Cruella and a Gaston spin-off.

Depending on where Moana ends up, any one of these might be delayed, paused or canned. No one is really crying out for any of them — except maybe that Lilo & Stitch follow-up.

It may not be a bad thing for Disney to return to the drawing board for something fresh. At one point, Moana was a completely new concept, and people loved her all the same.