‘Moana’ Live-Action Remake Box Office Projections Are Cratering, and Disney May Have a Real Problem on Its Hands

Disney has built an entire modern strategy around turning its animated classics into live-action tentpoles, and for a while, ‘Moana’ looked like one of the safer bets in that playbook. The original 2016 animated film made over $680 million worldwide against a budget of $150 million, and the franchise only grew from there when its sequel became one of the studio’s biggest recent hits.

The live-action version reunites much of that magic on paper. Thomas Kail directs the film, with Dwayne Johnson reprising his role as the demigod Maui and Catherine Laga’aia stepping in for Auli’i Cravalho in the title role. The movie was booked into roughly 3,900 theaters domestically, targeting an all women and families audience with Imax, PLF, 3D and 4DX formats behind it.

That is the backdrop against which tracking account Global Box Office dropped its latest bombshell. The account posted that the ‘Moana’ remake has been keeping a horrible pace in pre-sales after nearly a month on sale, warning the film might not even reach fifty million dollars domestically and that a previously reported one hundred thirty million dollar global opening now looks out of reach. Updated projections have pulled the film’s domestic opening weekend forecast down to somewhere between forty five and sixty million dollars, with some trackers pointing to figures as low as fifty to seventy million.

The math behind the panic is straightforward. With a reported production budget of around two hundred million dollars, the film is now being described as on track to become one of Disney’s biggest bombs if those numbers hold. Box Office Theory’s own forecast has since slid to a range of fifty seven to seventy two million domestically, a twenty three percent drop from where analysts had the film positioned only weeks earlier.

Comparisons to Disney’s recent live-action stumbles are flying fast. Industry watchers have already drawn parallels to ‘Snow White’, which finished its run at just over two hundred million dollars worldwide after years of controversy, and to Warner Bros’ ‘Supergirl’, which spent one hundred seventy million dollars to open at only thirty seven point one million. ‘The Little Mermaid’ is also part of the conversation, with its own effects heavy production reportedly costing somewhere around two hundred forty million dollars before marketing.

Part of the problem may simply be timing. ‘Moana’ is opening 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 numbers this summer and are expected to keep eating into the audience Disney needs. There is also a deeper identity question hanging over the project, since the original ‘Moana’ only came out in 2016, meaning much of its core audience is still made up of children or young adults rather than nostalgic grown-ups eager to revisit a distant memory, a dynamic very different from the decades long gaps Disney usually banks on for these remakes.

Whether the finished film can outrun its shaky advance numbers once general audiences and reviews arrive remains genuinely unclear, and Disney still has Johnson’s star power and the franchise’s built in fanbase working in its favor. But with a Deadline box office preview showing tracking that has already been revised downward multiple times in a single week, the pressure on opening weekend has rarely felt higher for a modern Disney remake.

Do you think Dwayne Johnson’s return as Maui can still save ‘Moana’ at the box office, or is this remake arriving one franchise cycle too soon?