WeeklyMovieReset ·
Live-Action Moana Opens Soft: Disney's $250M Nostalgia Miscalculation
Prefer to read? The full episode, in print.
Disney's live-action remake machine has one rule it has quietly broken with Moana: give nostalgia room to breathe. The average gap between one of Disney's animated classics and its live-action retelling is 46 years. With the new live-action Moana, which opened this past weekend, they waited less than ten. That single decision, I think, could cost them a hundred million dollars.
To be clear up front, this is not a review. I have not even seen the original animated film, so I am not going to pretend I have some deep sentimental attachment to it. But I have watched enough of these remakes to think I understood Disney's playbook, and Moana is the one that breaks it.
What Disney forgot about its own remake formula
There are two engines driving the Disney remake business: technology and nostalgia. The technology side is not the problem here. Advances in CGI, motion capture and VFX are exactly what made this "live-action" trend possible in the first place, air quotes fully intended, since a lot of what we are watching is still animation. The work Jon Favreau did on The Lion King and The Jungle Book is genuinely remarkable.
Nostalgia is the engine that Moana stalls. Cambridge defines nostalgia as a feeling of pleasure and slight sadness when you think about things from the past. The operative word is past. With these remakes, the product was never the story, because you already know the story. The product is the feeling attached to it. They are selling you the memory. And by definition, a memory needs time to form.
That is where Moana falls apart. If you were five when it came out in 2016, you are only about 14 or 15 now. Compare that to Cinderella, The Jungle Book, The Lion King or The Little Mermaid, where the pitch wrote itself: I loved this as a kid, now let me take my own kids. Plenty of people are attached to Moana, and I am not saying otherwise. But 10 years of goodwill is objectively different from 30 or 40.
If Moana is so popular, why remake it at all?
Because popularity is not the same thing as demand for more of the same, and that is exactly the trap Disney walked into. The original is not some faded title being dusted off. Bob Iger himself calls Moana an incredibly popular franchise. The 2016 film recently crossed one billion hours streamed on Disney Plus and was the most streamed movie of 2023 on any platform in the US. It just got a sequel. The animation still looks state of the art.
On paper, this looked like one of the easiest green lights ever: proven strategy, beloved characters, built-in audience. But that is the miscalculation. The film's director, asked what makes this version different, said you want a reason for being, then pointed straight back to how gorgeous the original is. His answer is the original. Moana 2 at least had a new story and a real reason to revisit these characters. The live-action version is, by most accounts, the same film beat for beat. When the original is still everywhere, retelling it note for note does not feel urgent. It feels redundant. And redundant is a brutal place to sit when your budget is $250 million.
Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations put it best: Disney's strategy depends on whether audiences see the remake as an event or a duplicate. This weekend suggests there really is such a thing as keeping a franchise too active.
Weekend box office: Moana wins, but softly
Moana won the weekend easily with $43 million domestic and $95 million worldwide. Winning is winning, and I will not take that away. But those figures sit well below the original projections, and for a franchise this size with a budget this large, that is a soft opening. It did land an A-minus CinemaScore, so the people who showed up, mostly parents and kids, liked it. It will need that word of mouth, because the opening plus marketing spend on top of $250 million leaves Disney very little breathing room.
It also faced real competition. Here is the full top 10.
| Rank | Film | Weekend |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Moana | $43M |
| 2 | Minions & Monsters | $20.5M |
| 3 | Toy Story 5 | $18.5M |
| 4 | Evil Dead Burn | $13.7M |
| 5 | Young Washington | $6.4M |
| 6 | The Invite | $5.7M |
| 7 | Obsession | $3.8M |
| 8 | Supergirl | $3.6M |
| 9 | Disclosure Day | $3.2M |
| 10 | Backrooms | $1.5M |
Toy Story 5 keeps on rolling, adding another $18.5 million to a genuinely incredible run. Evil Dead Burn opened in fourth with roughly $14 million. Much smaller budget than Moana, sure, but it still felt like a miss to me. It never caught the lightning in a bottle that Backrooms and Obsession bottled earlier this summer.
The surprise of the weekend was The Invite, which went wide and jumped 700% to $5.7 million. Small number in isolation, but for an adult comedy drama surrounded by kids movies and franchises, that is a legitimately good result and proof there is room for counter programming when the word of mouth is there.
The ongoing concern is Supergirl. It added $3.6 million for a domestic total around $66 million and $115 million worldwide. This movie has not recovered and has never found its legs. For scale: Obsession in its ninth weekend pulled $3.8 million, more than Supergirl managed in its third. The DC reset is not winning trust back. On a happier note, Michael crossed the billion-dollar mark, and I hope we get another one.
My takeaway on Moana: probably not bad, just redundant, and definitely not urgent.
What else matters this week
The new Dune: Part Three trailer landed at a global IMAX fan event, and it pushes the story somewhere darker and more complicated, which I am completely here for. The film reportedly jumps forward about 17 years, and Paul and Chani's relationship looks rough, the trailer opening on an argument about Paul seizing power for himself. Spectacle is never a worry with Denis Villeneuve. The real challenge of a final chapter is raising the stakes and sticking the landing. Worth noting: Linus Sandgren takes over cinematography from Greig Fraser. Sandgren shot most of Damien Chazelle's films and No Time to Die, so the look is in very good hands.
Two films unexpectedly lost their theatrical releases. Soulm8te, a M3GAN universe spin-off from Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, was pulled from the calendar after M3GAN 2.0 underperformed and now heads straight to digital on August 1. And in a wilder case, Paramount moved Avatar: The Last Airbender up to July 25 and shifted it to Paramount Plus after the entire film leaked online. Good news for fans who get it early, a bummer for theaters, and another sign of how fast business realities can rewrite a release plan.
The Odyssey finally docks this weekend
After weeks of kids movies parked at the top, Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey arrives and their run ends. It is the only major wide release, because who wants to open against Nolan? The cast is absurd: Matt Damon as Odysseus, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson. It reportedly cost $250 million, the exact same as Moana, which is its own kind of poetry. It is the first film shot entirely on IMAX film cameras, carries a three-week IMAX exclusive window, and is tracking between $80 and $100 million domestic.
If Moana is the cautionary tale about running a franchise into the ground, The Odyssey is the counterargument: an old story nobody has seen told this way, which is the whole point. I am seeing it Thursday night with my wife. Nostalgia can wait. Novelty is what gets people off the couch.