Disney’s live-action remake of Moana has tanked at the box office, and there is no shortage of explanations why, ranging from a script that repeats the 2016 original almost scene for scene to a release date that landed less than two years after Moana 2.
The movie’s failure has also cast a question on why audiences even find live-action remakes appealing since by their nature they are unnecessary. Universal and Disney both released successful live-action remakes in 2025, How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, respectively. Disney’s Moana is set to lose $100 million to $125 million. The difference between a live-action remake that makes money and one that bombs comes down to whether the movie gives audiences a reason to pay for a ticket to see a story many of them can already watch for free by streaming the animated original at home.
Dissecting The ‘Moana’ Debacle
Critics were not kind to Moana. The film settled at a 34% score on Rotten Tomatoes. But audiences who bought tickets saw the movie differently. Moana earned an A- CinemaScore, with women grading it a straight A and viewers under 18 handing out an A+. On Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornmeter, the film reached a 90% approval rating from verified ticket buyers, edging out the original animated film’s own audience score. Those numbers describe a movie that connected with the people who watched it.
The audience skewed 66% female, and 56% identified as parents attending with children. Women over 25 gave the film a 78% definite-recommend score on PostTrak, the highest mark of any demographic group measured, and women overall recorded a 70% definite recommend. Kids under 12 made up the single largest age bracket, at 28% of the audience. Those numbers describe families already invested in Moana as a character, largely mothers bringing young children, without much reach beyond that group.
But not enough viewers have carried the movie to justify the cost so far. Moana could very well mean the end of live-action remakes, or it could create a very big speed bump amid a long legacy of live-action films. In fact, the format has existed for many years. Disney released a live-action remake of The Jungle Book in 1994, and in 2010, Tim Burton directed Alice in Wonderland, to cite two examples. Moana is not the first failure, either.
Live-Action Films At A Crossroads
Universal’s How to Train Your Dragon and Disney’s own Lilo & Stitch, both released in 2025, are examples of the format working as intended. How to Train Your Dragon grossed more than $636 million worldwide on a $165 million, and Lilo & Stitch crossed $1 billion worldwide. Both films sit a short distance from Snow White (2025), The Little Mermaid (2023), Dumbo (2019), now Moana, all of them financial disappointments. The films that worked and the films that didn’t point to these factors:
The Audience Needs to Get Something Extra
A new song or 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. Lilo & Stitch alerted reworked key plot elements, including, most significantly, the ending, which drew criticisms but arguably inspired curiosity. 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.
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.
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.
