While Disney is currently winning at the box office with the overwhelming success of the 5th entry in Pixar’s Toy Story franchise, they are also taking a major hit in the continued slippery slope of their live action remakes. Moana has released in cinemas, a live action remake of a film only ten years old, and is immediately being seen as a disaster at the box office. Holding a massive 250 million dollar budget, the film fumbled in its opening weekend, and has only grossed 115 million so far, with Deadline reporting that the film could lose Disney between 100-125 million in the end. Live action movies under Disney used to be a certified cash cow, standing alongside their biggest hits in crowded years like 2019. 2019 was a massive year for the company, holding 7 out of the 10 highest grossing movies of the year, with Aladdin and The Lion King hitting one billion each. This would truly be the highest point for their live action endeavours, and would be what they have clearly been striving to recreate in the years since.
Disney have made live action remakes of their classics for years, most notably the Glenn Close-starring 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians from 1996 and 2000 respectively. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and the villain-centric update of Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent, would move the concept into the 2010s, and would not take off completely until Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book in 2016. The Jungle Book was the first monumental success of this trend, grossing nearly a billion dollars and receiving excellent reviews, and the following year featuring the billion-dollar grossing, The Beauty and The Beast made this a money-making scheme. Disney could see that this could be a ticket to success, there is no need to risk money on original ideas, when the company can repackage their old classics in a new lens, they already have the blueprints right there. That is what these remakes boil down to, Disney’s beloved classics reheated like a microwave meal, with the same plot beats but feeling like a mirror image, where something is deeply off.
This seemed like it could be a scheme that could last forever, but they have been unable to recapture the success of the three-line hit of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. The COVID-19 pandemic led to their reimagined and critically panned Mulan remake hitting streaming instead of cinemas, and the same case with Emma Stone’s starring feature, Cruella. Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio remake and David Lowery’s Wendy focused remake of Peter Pan were never even planned for the big screen, and made their home immediately on Disney+. Streaming has been a curse to many franchises, and even genres, accommodating audiences to expect and wait for films to hit streaming rather than experiencing the theatrical experience. Their next remake would suffer because of this, The Little Mermaid would be admis with controversy over its African-American lead, and would suffer at the box office, only to become a hit on streaming. 2024’s Mufasa, a prequel to their Lion King remake would walk to the finish line in slowly becoming profitable, but paling in comparison to its predecessor. Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot starred next in Sam Raimi’s Snow White remake, which faced a increasing amount of internet conversation, but still managed to lose the studio 170 million in the end.
The predecessor to this newest Disney live action remake is the one that shocked the system, and presumably made Disney confident that Moana could be a success. The billion dollar gross of Lilo and Stitch was a obvious success, it is a Gen Z focused property and has a more clear nostalgia factor compared to more earlier Disney animated features like Snow White and The Little Mermaid. Moana’s live action remake seems to have been fast-tracked mainly because of star Dwayne Johnson, being formely announced only seven years after the original film’s release. Even if the original animated feautre is immensely popular, and is consistently the most watched film on Disney’s streaming service, the film is still too recent to be able to bank on nostalgia. The biggest successes from these live action endeavours comes from the fact that the original films are old enough to be nostalgic, but not old enough that parents will have not been born either when they released. Moana lacks a nostalgic angle, no one who saw the movie in 2016 will be returning to watch the newest feature with any new members of a newer generation. Still, Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon remake was massively popular last year, which came only 15 years after the original animated film. However, this franchise had breathing room, with six years in between the ending of the animated series and the beginning of the live action.
The live-action take on Moana is also following-up the sequel to the animated film that only came out two years prior. Moana 2, which was a reworked pilot for a Moana television series, released into cinemas and made a billion dollars quickly, even after receiving mixed reviews from critics. With a 3rd Moana film in development, it could easily be construed that a fatigue has set in for the franchise, and the close proximity of a follow-up and a re-tread of the original would lead to one falling behind. With a mixture of the current streaming expectation, the fatigue from Moana and live action adaptations, and the lack of nostalgia facing the movie, it was bound to become a box office flop. It is also however, just a massive showcase of the weakness of these live action redo’s.
What is the point of watching these reimagining’s of classic movies when you can just watch the original? They never add anything massively different from the original, not even bothering to provide a reason for their existence, and crafting a product that feels inferior to the original. 2026’s take on Moana is a fine movie, down to it essentially being the same script as the original, but it is a mess visually. The reason these movies were originally so beloved is because of how visually impressive they were, the animation complemented the incredible scripts, and fleshed out characterisation with vivid character animation. These are lost in these live action remakes, Lion King loses any emotion from its characters from making them realistic and makes it visually more like a nature documentary. However, also when remaking a film like Moana, which is set mostly at sea, it is trading in one animation for another. The entire film is layered in visual effects, that can range in quality throughout, with Dwayne Johnson and newcomer Catherine Laga’aia interacting in a void of green screen effects that can look gaudy on screen. A lot of the stylised character designs from the original look very different in live action, and lose some of their visual connection to the audience. It is even worse with the musical sequences, the vocals and the song-writing is there, but the sequences are visually lazy and disjointed compared to the vast superior lyrics and performances.
Johnson, who serves as producer on the project, feels like he has aged out the role that was designed for him. Sporting a muscle body suit and a wig that makes the film look like a SNL skit, Johnson looks old and tired in every sequence, with not a inch of the fluidity or liveliness that was present in the animated depiction of Maui. Catherine Laga’aia is the one shining light, with a genuinely authentic performance that brings out the child-like wonder of the original character, feeling like the character brought to life. There is something distinctively different at least to a new actor acting out lines made for another, compared to the constant actors reprising their roles and reading the same lines out again. Jermaine Clement reprises his role as Tamatoa, brought to life as a visual effects character, and his performance, which should have been the same, feels restrained and tired, going through the motions as he reads out the same lines again.
There is a confusing question of why would they pick this movie to remake out of all the possible options? It comes out as a live action remake that is still mostly animated through its visual effects, filling a world that is colourful, lively and brimming with personality into a grey and realistic world which is brimming with anything but personality. Lilo and Stitch was a happy fluke across this dying trend, audiences seem to have become aware of the middling quality of these movies, with no remake getting good reviews since the peak of these movies in 2019. Moana just continues to show that these movies are no longer profitable, and that Disney is not in the place they were 7 years ago when every movie they released could crack a billion. Various live action projects have been shelved in the last couple of years, from a sequel to Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin to a sequel to The Jungle Book. A live action take on the Aristocrats was announced to be cancelled last year, alongside the cancellations of live action takes on Bambi, Robin Hood and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Currently only a Hercules film from Guy Ritchie, a sequel to billion-dollar grossing Lilo and Stitch and Tangled are slated for release.
Tangled is the true showing of if this brand can continue to stick. The original film will be 18 years old on release, and should be far enough removed from the original to allow true nostalgia and to be a hit with Gen Z audiences like Lilo and Stitch. Either way, the heights of this trend has long since gone, and if Disney wants to keep it alive, they need to pick their projects more carefully on what stays with audiences the most. The box office has changed since the pandemic, and now audiences are accustomed to staying at home and waiting for streaming. Watching a movie that has already released in animated form, and is available at home on streaming is a more cost-free method than paying money to watch a inferior version of that very film on the big screen. Moana is not a terrible film, but it is just the continued status of the laziest trend in Hollywood.
Rhys Reviews 
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