‘Moana’ Live-Action Remake, Starring Dwayne Johnson, Has Pre-Sales Bombing Harder Than Expected

Disney has built an entire modern business model around turning its animated classics into live action cash cows, but not every remake sails as smoothly as the studio hopes. This summer’s biggest test case is proving to be one of the company’s most beloved recent franchises, and the numbers coming in ahead of release are raising real questions about whether audiences actually wanted this version at all.

The live-action reimagining of ‘Moana‘ arrives on July 10 with Dwayne Johnson returning to physically embody Maui, the demigod he originally voiced, alongside newcomer Catherine Laga’aia stepping into the title role previously played by Auli’i Cravalho. Thomas Kail, known for directing “Fosse/Verdon,” helms the adaptation, working from a screenplay by Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller.

Early tracking painted an optimistic picture, with some forecasts placing the film’s domestic opening weekend as high as 85 to 96 million dollars, numbers that would have comfortably outpaced recent live-action remakes like “How to Train Your Dragon.” That optimism has since evaporated, and pre-sales data is now telling a much more troubling story for Disney’s latest tentpole.

Updated projections have pulled the film’s domestic opening weekend forecast down to somewhere between 45 and 60 million dollars, with some trackers pointing to figures as low as 50 to 70 million even before accounting for the weakest recent pre-sales data. That represents a steep drop from where analysts had the film positioned just weeks ago, and it puts ‘Moana’ on a trajectory that could make it one of Disney’s more expensive misfires of the year.

The budget math is what makes this trend so alarming. With production costs reportedly sitting around 200 million dollars before marketing, similar to past effects-heavy remakes like “The Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast” when adjusted for inflation, some analysts believe the film may need to gross somewhere between 575 and 700 million dollars worldwide just to be considered a genuine success rather than a costly disappointment.

Part of the challenge appears to be timing and market saturation rather than any single flaw in the production itself. ‘Moana’ is opening directly into a crowded family film corridor already dominated by Universal’s “Minions and Monsters” and Pixar’s “Toy Story 5,” both of which have posted enormous box office numbers this summer and are expected to continue eating into the audience Disney needs for its own remake to thrive.

There is also a more fundamental question hanging over the entire project that some industry analysts have raised repeatedly. Unlike Disney’s previous live action remakes, which typically revisited films from decades earlier, the original ‘Moana’ only came out in 2016, meaning much of its core audience are still children or young adults rather than nostalgic adults eager to revisit a distant childhood memory. That timing gap raises a genuine question about whether this particular property needed a live action version at all, especially with “Moana 2” having already delivered a massive billion dollar theatrical run in 2024.

Comparisons to Disney’s other recent live-action swings have not been kind either. Every current forecast for ‘Moana’ sits below the opening weekend Disney’s divisive 2023 “The Little Mermaid” remake managed, a film widely regarded as one of the studio’s more disappointing box office performers in this genre, and industry watchers have begun drawing direct parallels between Moana’s tracking slide and the recent struggles of Warner Bros.’s ‘Supergirl.’

With the film’s theatrical fate still unresolved and Johnson’s star power facing its own test of drawing power outside the recording booth, ‘Moana’ has quickly become one of the more closely watched box office stories of the summer for reasons Disney almost certainly did not intend. Whether the finished film outperforms its shaky pre-sales trend remains to be seen once it actually opens.

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