Ten years after Moana first sailed into theaters as an animated classic, its live-action remake was supposed to be a guaranteed hit. Instead, it just delivered one of the worst opening weekends in Disney’s live-action remake history.
Disney’s live-action Moana, directed by Thomas Kail and starring Dwayne Johnson as Maui, opened to $43 million domestically across 3,875 theaters over its July 11-13 weekend. That number came in roughly 35% below the studio’s own internal projection of $60 million to $65 million. Add in a soft $52 million overseas and the film’s worldwide debut landed at just $95 million, far short of what a summer tentpole with this kind of budget needed to open with.
The Numbers Behind the $100 Million Loss
Here’s where it gets ugly. The remake carried a $250 million production budget, and reports put its marketing spend at roughly $120 million to $145 million, pushing the film’s total price tag well past $370 million.
Since studios typically split box office revenue with theater chains while covering marketing costs entirely on their own, that means Moana likely needs to gross close to $500 million worldwide just to break even.
Sources close to the situation say the film stands to lose between $100 million and $125 million in its theatrical cycle, and that estimate assumes the movie eventually reaches $250 million at the global box office, a number insiders describe as conservative. For context, that puts live-action Moana in the same disaster tier as 2025’s Snow White, which opened to a similar $42.2 million domestically against its own $250 million budget.
So what went wrong for a franchise that, on paper, should have been bulletproof? The two animated Moana films have already sold $22 million in toys, generated $26 million in music streams, and racked up 1.5 billion hours watched on Disney+.
Timing appears to be the biggest culprit. Arriving less than two years after the billion-dollar animated sequel Moana 2, the remake simply didn’t give audiences enough distance from a story they’d already seen twice. The release date itself had been shuffled multiple times since Johnson and Disney CEO Bob Iger first announced the project back in April 2023, eventually settling on this July slot.
Reviews haven’t helped the cause either, with the remake sitting at a rough 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics have zeroed in on the film’s heavy reliance on CGI, arguing the hyper-realistic visuals strip away the warmth and stylization that made the animated version so beloved.
What This Means for Disney’s Remake Machine
This isn’t an isolated stumble. Disney is coming off The Mandalorian and Grogu, which grossed around $340 million worldwide against a $165 million budget, and a reported $130 million loss on Tron: Ares in 2025. Stack those together with Snow White and now Moana, and a pattern starts to emerge: the era of Disney printing money by simply reshooting its animated library in live-action looks like it’s over.
The tricky part is timing. Wait too long between the animated original and the remake and there’s not enough cultural relevance left. Move too fast and there’s no nostalgia gap to justify the ticket price, especially when audiences can just rewatch the original on Disney+. Moana found itself trapped by the second problem, releasing into a market still saturated with its own franchise.
Whether Disney rushes the film to Disney+ to recoup some of that projected loss remains to be seen, but the studio’s next moves in this space are going to be watched very closely.