Disney's live action Moana just badly underperformed at the box office

[Gareth19]

Disney's live action remake of Moana opened to somewhere between 40 and 45 million dollars domestically this weekend, well short of the 60 million plus the studio had reportedly been hoping for. That is a rough number for a film following a decade old animated original that itself spawned Moana 2, which sailed past a billion dollars worldwide only recently

The timing does not help either. Moana is competing directly against Disney's own Toy Story 5, which is still doing strong business in its third weekend and closing in on a billion dollars globally, plus Minions and Monsters from a rival studio. Crowding your own release calendar with a competing family film is an unusual bit of self sabotage for a studio that normally plans these things carefully

Catherine Laga'aia stars as Moana with Dwayne Johnson back as Maui, and the film features new songs from Lin Manuel Miranda alongside music from the original. On paper that is a strong creative package, so the soft opening probably says more about remake fatigue and a packed summer schedule than about the film's quality specifically

Disney has had mixed luck with these animated to live action remakes before, some like Lilo and Stitch and The Lion King did enormous business, while others landed with more of a shrug. Whether Moana recovers with a long tail through the rest of summer or fades quickly will say a lot about how much appetite is actually left for this remake strategy

Box Officedeadline.com

[Fam28]

Competing with your own Toy Story 5 in the same window feels like such an unforced error, why would Disney do that to itself

[TeaSpiller]

Remake fatigue is real at this point, audiences have seen this exact playbook enough times now to be a bit numb to it

[DistantSequence]

Moana 2 doing a billion dollars probably actually hurt this one, people already got their fix of new Moana content recently

[InferenceLoop65]

Lin Manuel Miranda writing new songs for it is honestly the part that sounds most interesting to me, curious how those turned out

[WWEHarry78]

Wonder if this ends up having a long legs run through the summer or just quietly fades after week two like some of these remakes do

[Velvet Connor]

Dwayne Johnson coming back as Maui was never going to be the problem, this really does feel like a scheduling and fatigue issue more than anything