I suppose this is no great surprise, but we often see that even “bad” ‘kids’ movies end up with high audience scores, perhaps due to a relatively low entertainment bar for certain ages. Rarely, however, do we see a gap as large as what Moana has just registered on Rotten Tomatoes.
Before release, Moana received the single lowest Rotten Tomatoes critic score for a Disney live-action animation adaptation ever, a 34%. Now that audiences have shown up (well, not in great numbers, as we’ll get to), the movie now has a 90% audience score. It appears being 1:1, shot-by-shot, line-by-line remake was enough to produce similar results to the original, which, shockingly enough, has an 89% audience score, though with 100x the total number of reviews in (plus a 96% critic score, one of Disney’s highest ever).
But even if early viewers are scoring Moana highly, there aren’t enough of them to make the film a hit, and it may be on the path to becoming an actual bomb for Disney. Moana is set to bring in $43 million domestically, far below initial $60+ million predictions, and miles below something like 2025’s Lilo and Stitch remake, which drew $146 million its opening weekend. This year, Toy Story 5 brought in $159 million.
This is extremely bad news for Moana, which reportedly cost $250 million. As ever, marketing and distribution costs are layered on top of that, and this will be a hard lesson for Disney to learn, possibly influencing its future plans. One issue is recency, that while Moana came out 10 years ago, Moana 2 was just out in 2024. And while these audience scores are high, and often critic reviews don’t impact box office, these are awful reviews, They are literally the worst ever for this genre, so there is a limit in terms of how much they can be ignored.
Bootleg clips are now circulating on social media showing flat acting and flatter visuals. Meanwhile, Disney is running ads with that 90% “verified hot” Rotten Tomatoes audience score, and reiterating that it’s “the #1 movie in the world.” Meanwhile, Evil Dead Burn, also out this weekend, is probably going to earn 40-50% of what Moana is bringing in, and that’s on a $20 million budget. Gotta love horror films.
One of the next large-scale animation adaptations will be a live-action version of Tangled, starring Teagan Croft, Milo Manheim and Kathryn Hahn. That will no doubt be a project that needs to study just what happened here with Moana, and not relive any of those mistakes. At least Tangled and its characters haven’t been seen since 2010.
It may have been Disney logic that a project like Moana would automatically print money regardless of quality, but even with these audience scores, that clearly isn’t happening.