‘Moana’ Faces Box Office Test, Less Than Two Years After Franchise’s Last Big Theatrical Splash
Dwayne Johnson and Catherine Laga’aia lead Disney‘s live-action Moana, which aims to make waves in its box office debut this weekend but could face a challenge, coming less than two years after the latest entry in the island-centric film franchise.
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Director Thomas Kail‘s movie is eyeing a domestic weekend start between $60 million and $65 million with a launch spanning 3,900 theaters in North America. This is dialed back from last month, when tracking for the film — which marks the studio’s latest live-action reimagining after striking it big with 2025’s Lilo & Stitch — suggested Moana’s domestic weekend debut could reach as high as $75 million or above.
With a hefty production budget of $250 million, Disney will need Moana to serve as a family-friendly summer option for weeks to come. The film remakes directors John Musker and Ron Clements’ 2016 animated musical of the same name that introduced Johnson as the voice of demigod Maui alongside Auli’i Cravalho as Moana. The movie centers on Moana teaming up with Maui to stop a curse from impacting her family’s island.
The new Moana hasn’t quite gone over swimmingly with the majority of critics. In his review for The Hollywood Reporter, chief film critic David Rooney wrote that “this charming new iteration stands confidently on its own,” but the latest Moana holds just a 37 percent Rotten Tomatoes approval rating from reviewers.
Disney will hope that audiences aren’t suffering from franchise overload, given that Moana 2, the animated sequel that saw the returns of Johnson and Cravalho, hit theaters in November 2024. Despite initially being conceived as a Disney+ series, the movie was a smash hit, collecting $225 million domestically over the five-day Thanksgiving frame en route to surpassing $1 billion globally. With the original Moana having hit theaters less than a decade ago — when it scored an $82 million five-day domestic opening over Thanksgiving in 2016 and $643 global cume — this makes it the most recent Disney animated film to get the live-action treatment.
“To be honest with you, I never bought into this idea [of], ‘You have to wait 20 years. You have you wait 30 years. It’s too soon,’” Johnson told THR at this week’s Moana premiere in Los Angeles. “I honestly never did — and not because I’m biased and I made the film — but because there’s themes and values in this, in animated Moana, that could translate really well if you saw a real young girl going through it.”
Disney’s live-action The Lion King from 2019 remains the biggest success story of the studio’s reimaginings, having opened to $191 million domestically. Lilo & Stitch wasn’t too far behind that with its May 2025 opening of $146 million in North America, en route to hitting $1 billion globally. Chris Sanders, who directed the 2002 animated Lilo & Stitch and voices the titular alien, returns to helm a forthcoming live-action sequel, while a live-action Tangled, starring Teagan Croft and Milo Manheim, has begun production in Spain.
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A recent misfire for the live-action properties was Snow White, featuring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot. This one opened to $42 million domestically in March of last year.
Moana has been quite a prosperous brand for the studio. Disney touts that the property has led to more than 1.5 billion hours streamed on Disney+, in addition to selling more than 22 million toys sold and surpassing 26 billion music streams.
Other family-friendly titles providing competition for the frame include Disney’s Toy Story 5, which has crossed $800 million globally just ahead of its fourth weekend, and Universal’s Minions & Monsters. The latter opened last weekend to the lowest domestic sum for a title in the Despicable Me franchise.
This summer’s ups and downs at the box office suggest that viewers may be more likely to gravitate to a property that has had a longer theatrical absence. DC Studios’ Supergirl became one of the season’s biggest misfires when Warner Bros. released it June 26, a year after Superman landed in cinemas. Additionally, Minions & Monsters arrived two years after 2024’s Despicable Me 4, which followed 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru.
Also hitting theaters in wide release is Warner Bros.’ horror offering Evil Dead Burn, the latest installment in the Evil Dead film franchise that kicked off with Sam Raimi’s 1981 original. Rooney’s review for THRnoted the new movie’s “orgiastic slaughter.”
Looming on the horizon is the July 17 release of Universal’s The Odyssey, with Christopher Nolan directing a star-studded cast that includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Anne Hathaway and Lupita Nyong’o. Ready to swing into theaters on July 31 is Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day, also starring Holland. No wide releases are scheduled for the weekend in between those two attention grabbers, giving audiences a chance to catch up on titles like Moana.
