How much “Moana” is too much? In a franchise-management misstep, Disney just found out.
Disney’s live-action “Moana,” arriving less than two years after “Moana 2,” was on pace to collect roughly $43 million at the domestic box office from Thursday through Sunday, the company said on Sunday. Disney had been aiming for $60 million or more.
Overseas, the latest “Moana” added $52 million, for a worldwide opening of about $95 million — a brutal start for a movie that cost about $250 million to make and at least another $100 million to market. Studios split ticket sales roughly 50-50 with theaters.
Reviews were overwhelmingly negative.
In a statement, Disney called the weekend total “a good start ahead of a full month of summer vacation play with families.” The company noted that moviegoers were much more forgiving than critics: The Rotten Tomatoes audience score stood at 90 percent positive on Sunday. Ticket buyers gave the new “Moana” an A-minus grade in CinemaScore exit polls.
“This release also builds on nearly a decade of Moana’s growth as a franchise,” Disney added.
The animated “Moana” (2016) and “Moana 2” (2024) were the two most-streamed movies on Disney+ last year, the company said. Music from the first films has been played more than 26 billion times across music streaming services. Disney parks and cruise ships offer at least 35 “Moana”-themed experiences, from attractions to parades to character meet-and-greets. Retailers have sold more than 22 million “Moana”-themed toys since 2016.
Franchise ubiquity, however, probably worked against the new “Moana” movie, box office analysts said.
Disney has long been Hollywood’s master of movie franchise management, and scarcity is central to its strategy. In the 1990s, the company created the “Disney vault,” routinely pulling animated classics from home video for years at a time to manufacture exclusivity. (“Hurry, the vault closes soon!”) More recently, it let nearly a decade pass between “Toy Story 4” and last month’s blockbuster “Toy Story 5.” Ticket buyers had time to miss Woody and Buzz.
On average, Disney has waited 27 years before remaking one of its animated classics as a live-action movie, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. (He described the weekend results for “Moana” as “weak,” noting that Disney’s live-action remakes have opened to an average of about $92 million in domestic theaters.)
In recent years, however, Disney has occasionally abandoned its own playbook. Under pressure to feed Disney+ and squeeze more value from franchises like Marvel and “Star Wars,” the company flooded the market. Hence a third stand-alone “Ant-Man” movie, which disappointed at the box office. In the case of “Star Wars,” Disney acknowledged that pushing its Lucasfilm division to crank out a new movie every year had been a mistake.
Disney’s decision to make a live-action “Moana” so soon was partly because it had run out of animated classics from earlier decades to remake. Since 2010, the company has done “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Cinderella,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “Dumbo,” “The Lion King,” “Aladdin,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “Mulan,” “Pinocchio,” “The Jungle Book,” “Peter Pan,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Lilo & Stitch.”
At the same time, as the theatrical marketplace has become challenged by streaming, Disney’s live-action movie division has struggled — along with the rest of Hollywood — to find original hits. The last original Disney live-action movies to turn into megawatt series were “National Treasure” in 2004 and “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” in 2003.
“Moana” may have suffered from other challenges. The most-successful Disney live-action remakes of animated movies have offered audiences at least something new — Will Smith as the wisecracking Genie in “Aladdin,” Emma Watson (fresh from the “Harry Potter” franchise) as Belle in “Beauty and the Beast.” The movie that Disney released over the weekend was a near shot-by-shot recreation of the 2016 movie, with a bewigged Dwayne Johnson reprising his role as the demigod Maui.
Competition for family moviegoers is also extreme at the moment. For the weekend in North America, “Moana” was No. 1, followed by “Minions & Monsters” (Universal-Illumination), which was expected to take in about $20.5 million, for a two-week domestic total of $108.3 million. “Toy Story 5” (Disney-Pixar) was third, with projected ticket sales of $18.5 million, bringing its four-week domestic total to $403.8 million.
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