Summer is usually home to some of the biggest movie releases of the year, and while audiences have been treated to the likes of Toy Story 5 and Obsession over the past couple of months (with The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day right around the corner), this summer has arguably been more notable for the number of high-profile films that have underperformed. The Mandalorian and Grogu underwhelmed. Masters of the Universe and Supergirl bombed with sub-$40 million domestic openings. Even the typically reliable Minions couldn’t live up to expectations over the Fourth of July weekend. Now, another summer tentpole is poised to land with a soft debut: Disney’s live-action Moana remake.
Videos by ComicBook.com
According to Deadline, Moana is projected to earn $60+ million domestically in its first three days. That figure is well below the initial estimates that came out a few weeks ago. In late June, tracking indicated Moana would make around $85 million in its opening, which still wouldn’t have been the strongest start.
Will Moana‘s Opening Weekend Beat the 2016 Animated Original?
This latest box office data is a troubling sign for Moana and Disney. As a point of comparison, the original animated Moana opened with $82 million over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend back in 2016. $56.6 million of that came over its first Friday-Sunday. This means there’s a chance the live-action Moana doesn’t outgross the 2016 film’s opening. Any hopes it had of topping the animated film’s five-day debut are all but slashed at this point. The bigger question is whether or not Moana 2026 will beat the $56.6 million Moana 2016 posted in its first Friday-Sunday.
Box office projections are not an exact science, so there have been plenty of recent films that exceeded expectations. However, there have also been others that underperformed even low estimates. We only have to look back to June for examples; Masters of the Universe was initially projected to open between $30-35 million and it ended up with $29.4 million. At one point, tracking for Supergirl was as high as $50+ million, but it had to settle for $37.1 million. If Moana is more along the lines of those disappointments, it may not reach the $60 million currently being projected. It doesn’t help matters that early reactions to the film are largely negative, with some people calling it “creatively bankrupt.”
Assuming Moana is unable to turn things around, this could go down as a sizable loss for Disney. Moana is budgeted somewhere between $200-250 million, a figure that does not include marketing and distribution costs. Going by general industry rules of thumb, that means Moana likely needs to earn as much as $625 million worldwide just to break even. It’s unlikely to get much help from the international box office, as the estimated global opening is just $130 million. Given the popularity of the Moana franchise (the animated Moana 2 crossed $1 billion over Thanksgiving 2024), Disney was hoping a live-action remake of the first film could be a massive draw, similar to last year’s Lilo & Stitch. Instead, this is looking like a misfire.
If Moana‘s actual numbers are as bleak as the estimates suggest, it will raise a new wave of questions about the viability of Disney’s live-action remake strategy. Last year, when Snow White bombed and Lilo & Stitch became a hit, seemed to provide a clear path forward. The takeaway there was that remakes based on more modern animated films could still be a draw; many of Disney’s most successful remakes draw from the studio’s ’90s renaissance (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast). But here, audiences appear to be rejecting a new take on one of Disney’s most popular animated franchises of the past decade. Perhaps the Moana remake is arriving too soon, unable to fully capitalize on the nostalgia The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast rode on. The animated Moana series is still ongoing, with a third movie on the way, so it looks like moviegoers are just going to wait for that.
What do you think? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
